Initial
by Scarabbug
Summary: It was at twelve fifteen a.m. when the Knight Industries Four Thousand, KITT, as he was known to his friends, despite the inaccuracy of that acronym died. And things just got more and more complicated from there. Character death. New chapter up.
1. Prologue

**The summary and a line in this fic are in fact, something of a steal on my part, gacked from a _Voyager_-oriented fanfiction in the _Star_ _Trek: Strange New Worlds_ fan-written collective. I believe it was volume four… or possibly five. Ether way, this is intended as a homage as opposed to plagiarism (since we're writing fanfiction, the legal logic is difficult to deal with anyway).**

**This begins as a deathfic, but gets a lot more complicated as it goes on. Set in the Knight Rider 2000 universe, whichever universe that may be. Standard disclaimers apply and reviews and concrit are always appreciated.

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**Initial.  
Prologue.**

_"I am the Knight Industries Four Thousand. K.I.T.T, for short. KITT if you prefer. I am programmed to prevent the loss of human life at any cost… A rather Ashimovian concept in all, but I feel obliged to mention that free will remains a factor."

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_

It was at twelve fifteen a.m. on the Eighteenth of October 2003 when the Knight Industries Four Thousand (KITT, as he was known to his friends, despite the inaccuracy of that acronym) died.

He did it the same way he did everything: Extremely well. It took less than five seconds. He would have been able to analyse that time to the nearest millisecond had his internal chronometer not been damaged before his Time of Death. (Or, as Maddox might call it, his Time of Termination). As it happened, time for KITT moved in something of a blur during his last minutes (or hours, or maybe days. Impossible to be sure).

It was a personal sacrifice of sorts –a conclusion he had reached after following a careful series of deductions, dictated to him by his programming. KITT was designed, fashioned and programmed to prevent the loss of any human life, despite what the cost might be to himself.

Those who knew him might well remark that his programming had had nothing to do with it. That KITT had acted of his own free will to protect those he cared most about, regardless of what his program dictated. Whether this was true, or merely their own attempt at consoling themselves is something we will never be certain about. Either way, KITT's decision was made, and that decision killed him in less than half a minute.

The death of the Knight Industries Four Thousand's partner was not nearly so perfect. Humans were naturally messy about these kinds of things. They were far too organic to even think about dying neatly, and most of them hated the prospect anyway. They saw a strange kind of… glory in ending their days with as much fire as possible.

There was no glory, but there was certainly fire. The last thing KITT'S driver had had the chance to do was smile at him, bright and beautiful in the darkness of the driver's seat. Then she smashed from the inside out; their connection (a microchip-link interwoven between their minds if they were to be believed) severed and ripped apart along with his body.

If the actual shut down of the chip joining their brains didn't kill her, then shock and the twenty foot drop to the concrete sidewalk below them certainly did. His death was simple, clean, efficient, and astoundingly noble. Hers was complex, ugly, painful and unwarranted. She was destroyed by the aftershock of the thing which killed her car.

Her name was Shawn McCormick. She was a hero, and she will not be forgotten.

No one was entirely certain, of course, how or why either of them had died in the first place. That was why Michael Knight had been called. That was why he was here.

They would have to keep an eye on him…

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	2. File: One

**My decision to call each following chapter a "file" was partly inspired by the recent cult anime _Serial Experiments Lain_: a series focussed on internet –"The Wired"– based and artificially created bodies and worlds (and the questioning of identity, if you want to get psychological about it). In that series, each episode of the series was called a "layer".  
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**I have no excuse for the first scene you're about to see being in present tense as opposed to the usual past tense… it sounded better in my head, and I fear I yielded to the inclination. Whether or not it works is as much your guess as it is mine. Standard disclaimers apply.** **Reviews are not nessecary but they _do_ taste very nice.  
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File: One. 

_3:32 am Eastern Standard Time. _

Professor of Computer Electronics at Harvard University Bonnie Barstow ends a brief phone call and checks in at the entrance gate for flight 345 to California.

Her hands are shaking. They always do. She takes deep breaths and taps a pressure point on her throat to calm herself down, the way and old friend taught her. It always worked for him, but then, he was never afraid.

Bonnie Barstow has always hated flying, but she hates the waiting even more. It gives you too much time to think, about where you're heading and where you've been and what the hell you're supposed to do next. This time there are no bombers or hijackers. There are no nervous teenagers and ransom demands against the government, but all the same, Bonnie is more terrified than she has ever been before.

Still, maybe the fear she's feeling is less to do with the plane and more to do with the destination.

Bonnie has no ideas what she's about to do. What she should expect. These aren't the old days of the Foundation anymore, and the Knight Industries Four Thousand_ is not the same machine as KITT. _

It's the same mind, though. That's what counts, and that's what makes this so difficult. That's the reason, at the root of it, why they has called her in the first place. Because nobody, they say, understands the mind of KITT like Bonnie Barstow.

Her, and Michael Knight. Adopted heir to a legacy he'd long since retired himself from. A man who lost his identity, and then his wife, and then everything else to the fight he signed up for of his own free will. His choice in the matter really doesn't make Bonnie feel any better about things. The bottom line is that Michael quit. And not long after, so did Bonnie.

She'd returned to FLAG once in the last five years, to help KITT adjust into a new body. She'd met Shawn McCormick, a woman with all Michael's flair and fire and beauty to boot. Another woman who had lost everything to betrayal and then found a friend in KITT to make up for it. Bonnie knows about the chip in Shawn's head, and the mental connection that bound them together, and now she knows that Shawn is dead, and what remains of KITT lies in ribbons and tatters, but that's all she knows.

It was all she needed to know to get her on this goddamn death trap on wings.

…This isn't the way she wanted things to be. This isn't the way she wanted things at all.  
  
'Good morning ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking and welcoming you to the one-fifteen flight to San Francisco International Airport, we will now go through the safety procedures to follow in case of an emergency…'

* * *

'YOU ARE THE KNIGHT INDUSTRIES FOUR THOUSAND. WHO ARE YOU?'

It had been three hours.

Three hours and nine minutes, if you wanted to get technical. KITT could've measured that time stretch a lot more accurately if his chronometer were working, which it wasn't. Michael had ran a few checks on the car's other systems (the ones he still recognized, anyway) and found that nothing much was. Still his knowledge of KITT's internal systems always pretty much stopped at the flashing lights and "MALFUNCTION WARNING!" usually broadcasted by the visual screen.

The screen, like everything else, was dead.

'YOU ARE THE KNIGHT INDUSTRIES FOUR THOUSAND. ABBREVIATION K.I.F.T. WHO ARE YOU?'

This was the question which Bonnie (on the phone, while running to catch a last minute flight) had told Michael to ask. According to her, it was the first question KITT had ever been presented with when he first came online in a computer mainframe in Washington. In fact, it had pretty much been the first thing anyone had ever "said" to him.

'YOU ARE THE KNIGHT INDUSTRIES FOUR THOUSAND. ABBREVIATION K.I.F.T. PREVIOUSLY THE KNIGHT INDUSTRIES TWO THOUSAND. ABBREVIATION K.I.T.T. WHO ARE YOU?'

KITT's first instant of life. Michael had heard the story. Observed and carefully scrutinized under the gaze of countless technicians, electronics engineers, neuroscientists, technical designers, executives, psychologists, government-sponsored corporations and one rather worried looking Advisory to the President of the United States.

Ten days later, KITT had been able to run up a list concerning the aforementioned presidential advisor's many illegal dealings by means of tapping government funding. He hadn't remained in office for long after that, and KITT's existence had been hushed up no less quickly afterwards. It was only now that Michael was beginning to realise exactly what this story really _meant_, almost twelve years after KITT had first told him.

The CPU that was KITT wasn't connected to its car shell, but sat on the buckled dashboard right in front of his face all the same. Michael sat in the driver's seat, because that was where he felt the most comfortable, even taking into account the fact that the black beneath was stained with someone else's blood. They hadn't thought to remove it yet. They hadn't…

_Shawn._

Michael bites his tongue and grips (what remains of) the steering wheel with the hand he isn't using to type, because there isn't time to think about Shawn McCormick right now. His focus is on KITT. KITT's question and KITT's endless not-answers.

The first few dozen times he typed; the only thing Michael changed was the name and number of the car. Now though, he was running out of patience.

'YOU ARE THE KNIGHT INDUSTRIES FOUR THOUSAND. BUT WE ALWAYS CALL YOU KITT. WHO ARE YOU?'

The laboratory was as quiet as a mortuary as Michael sat typing. There were people out there –technicians, electronic engineers and the like, but they were barely even shadows in the background, looking over their machines and diagnostic tools. He could almost imagine they were ghosts.

Sooner or later KITT would respond. Bonnie said the question was programmed into the AI's primary databanks, right at the very core of his being. A query that required an answer. A question mark KITT could not refuse, provided he had the capacity to do so. So long as it was asked, it demanded a response.

But it wasn't the question Michael wanted to ask.

'YOU THERE, KITT? IT'S ME.'

No. The question Michael wanted to ask was "Why?" The one which had been pounding in his head, over and over for the last twelve hours. Nobody had any answers, or at least, none of the answers he wanted to hear. Nobody could tell him how this happened. Nobody knew. Nobody could explain.

Except for the (dead) AI on the dashboard.

'KITT? IT'S MICHAEL.'

The only thing that answered him was the writing on the back of his hand. A single, scribbled word. One he had to look at every time he went to type another letter: Mistletoe Valley.

It's a name he remembers only vaguely from his old childhood. The kind of place where parents used to take their kids for picnics and their dogs for walks and with absolutely no sign of the Mistletoe after which it was named. Until development moved in and bulldozed right through the woodland as if it were so much deadwood. Right now Mistletoe Valley is more of a haven for businessmen escaping their hectic daily lifestyles than for wildlife.

Mistletoe Valley. A location –the one and only thing that anyone could give him. The place two hundred miles outside of their current mission location, where KITT's shell and shattered CPU had been found, still spitting trails of energy.

And then, after barely a half hours search, the body of Shawn McCormick.

Sooner or later, Michael would go there. Preferably sooner. He'd find out the answers he wanted, regardless of what it took and whether or not Maddock appreciated his interference.

_'Jesus, KITT,_ why_?'_

The dark screens offer no explanation.

_What were you doing out there? What was Shawn doing? What were you looking for? Who did this? Who do I have to track down and hurt for this? _

'Give me some answers, KITT. I need to know.' 

'Keep talking to him,' Bonnie had said to him, her voice snapping so harshly Michael was almost tricked into thinking she wasn't glad to hear from him. Then she hung up just as abruptly. Angry or not, he can't wait for that plane to touch down. For her to_get here_ and help them work out some answers. Maddock probably wouldn't like it, but Michael didn't give a damn. No one in FLAG had heard from him anyway since the discovery of Shawn's Body. Since he'd been the one to identify (what was left of) it, since…

_Crap._

Michael didn't know anything about Shawn and her superior's relationship, but he found himself hoping it wasn't anything like his had been with Devon. Nobody deserved to feel something like that. Nobody deserved to have to identify their own child's body. Michael wonders, with grim humour, whether that's his job here now. Maybe he's here to identify whatever remains of KITT's _body_ so they can rip it apart again and built a gleaming new machine out of what was left functioning. It's the kind of humour that makes him feel sick and stab a little harder at his keypad.

'IF THE KNIGHT INDUSTRIES TWO THOUSAND DOESN'T ANSWER THE QUESTION REAL SOON, I AM GOING TO GET PISSED. MAYBE EVEN A LITTLE SCARED. WHO ARE YOU?'

Static danced across the vehicles battered hood. There was a flicker of power buried deeply in processors that Michael couldn't even try to identify. He didn't pretend to know anything about how KITT worked, but he still knew exactly how he _felt_.

He knew all about the chip in Shawn's brain. He knew what destroying it might've done. What destroying her might've done. But those were possibilities he didn't dare to consider just now. Michael adjusted his position in the driver's seat and felt joints crackling where they wouldn't have five years earlier. Nearly forty years old and starting to feel it.

'I KNOW THE NAME'S WRONG. I KNOW THAT'S CONFUSING. MAYBE YOU'RE CONFUSED FULL STOP.

'DO YOU KNOW WHY WE CALL YOU K.I.T.T, WHEN IT SHOULD BE K.I.F.T? DO YOU REMEMBER?

'STILL NOT GOING ANYWHERE, NO MATTER HOW BORED YOU LET ME GET.'

There had been a time, in the old days, when Michael had been able to tell whether KITT was functioning properly or not depending on his tone of voice and what noises his engine was making, but he couldn't have even started trying to fix him.

These aren't the old days anyway. They haven't been the old days for…

…For a long time now.

Another gleam of static. For a moment, the cracked CPU screen seemed to flicker red. In the background, the bodies of technicians stirred and trembled in a kind of united sigh. Michael ignored them, just as he had mostly ignored them ever since he had been directed into the room. He didn't know them. They didn't matter, except it the ways in which they might possibly be able to help KITT. names, faces… nothing. The only name that would be really noticed right now would be Bonnie Barstow.

'HAVEN'T GONE ANYWHERE. _WON'T_ GO ANYWHERE.

'YOU ARE THE KNIGHT INDUSTRIES FOUR THOUSAND, NEE THE KNIGHT INDUSTRIES TWO THOUSAND. WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU, KITT?'

Nothing.

And then something.

Michael jolted upwards so suddenly his head smashed against the buckled-in roof of the car. It wasn't much: barely a flicker of red in the screen, that almost seemed to be taking on the shape of what KITT might call a syllable. Then it died almost entirely to black again. However, a single sliver of red light clung fast at the bottom of the screen, like a lifeline.

There are no dead bodies here. Not now. Not here.

'SIGNAL AGAIN, KITT. SHIFT THE LINE, DO ANYTHING TO LET ME KNOW YOU CAN HEAR.'

The red light flickered, but Michael couldn't honestly tell whether it was just a vague fluctuation or something.

'Mister Knight?'

One of the shadows behind him was moving, stepping forwards into the ring of light surrounding the shattered vehicle. As it approached, Michael could see that it was wearing glasses, and was shaped very much like a human female. 'Are you alright in there?'

'SECOND QUESTION: THE PURPOSE OF THE KNIGHT INDUSTRIES FOUR THOUSAND IS THE PRESERVATION OF HUMAN LIFE. WHAT IS THE PRIMARY PURPOSE OF THE KNIGHT INDUSTRIES FOUR THOUSAND?'

Her name escaped him. He knew he should really work on learning these people's names. Hell, he needed to work on identifying them as _people_ full stop. This person, as she clearly was, learned down resting her hands carefully on the battered hood of the car, and smiled at him.

'Remember me? We met in the car park seven hours ago.'

'I… sure I remember you, you're…'

'Jessica Matthews,' she holds out a hand and he moves his free hand from the wheel to take hold of hers, just for a second. 'I'm the new Third Level technician for this department… it's my first department, actually. My first time in a lab. I'm new at this, so you'll have to excuse the shoes.'

Shoes. Michael hadn't even noticed her shoes but he did now -they're high heels, anything but suited for the area in which she was working. Bonnie would probably have a fit. He wondered vaguely why he hadn't heard them tapping on the tile floor. 'I'm surprised you don't recognize me. You rammed into my parked car out in the lot a few hours ago.'

Oh. Yeah. She owned _that_ car; the one he's sort of accidentally collided with in his rush to find a parking space for the Chevy and get inside the FLAG building as quickly as possible. Jessica. Michael tries to process that and hold onto it. Her name is Jessica. In her late twenties-early thirties, oriental, pretty, bold and eager to please, the current tertiary technician assigned to electronics, and Michael was not even glancing at her legs.

'Oh. Right. I… Sorry about that.'

'No apology necessary, but your insurance details would be nice,' Jessica shook her head. She examined the remains of KITT's battered hood, drawing out wires and scanning various systems with the device she held in one hand. She had none of Bonnie's gentleness, but she did have the understanding air of somebody who had been under KITT's hood many times. Somehow that didn't make Michael feel any better. The room still felt like it was dropping a degree in temperature every minute. He tried to go back to typing.

'We're getting signals back there,' Jessica said in what she clearly hoped was a voice of encouragement. 'Signals we weren't getting half an hour ago. Professor Barstow was right to say we should call you though I still don't quite understand why. I'd say it's a pleasure to meet you, Mister Knight, but under the circumstances…'

She glanced uneasily over the machine, the way someone might look at a bad computer. There was no feeling there. No awareness of the personality currently torn to shreds and sitting on the dashboard in front of them, all she saw was a broken machine and the possibilities of repairing it. She didn't know KITT, Michael decided. She was new to FLAG and couldn't be expected to understand. Nice enough, though. She seemed… patient, obviously skilled…

This obviously isn't the way she wanted to begin her first day at FLAG.

'You knew Shawn.' He said. It wasn't a question.

Jessica crouched by the vehicle, close to his side. 'Yes. I met her before I joined FLAG, we…' she hesitated, the same expression in her eyes that Bonnie used to get when she and Michael were first getting to know each other. 'We didn't always see eye to eye back then, but she was an admirable woman. I'll miss her. I'm sorry I never had a chance to work with her here. If I had, things might've turned out differently… Did you... Wait, don't answer. Of course you must've known her. She was your successor, after all.'

Successor. Michael had never really thought of it in that way, nor did he really have any desire to. Shawn's pairing with KITT had been, much like his, both utterly by chance and utterly unavoidable.

'Good.' That was all he was planning to say to her, but somehow the words 'at least somebody will remember her name,' slipped out afterwards, without his consent. He swallowed hard. Typed. And Jessica watched him with curious eyes that he was trying his best to ignore. The firmness of her gaze was almost disturbing.

'Looks to me like you're trying to have a conversation with it.'

'I am.'

Jessica's expression shifted into something resembling guilt, which then cleared and was replaced with stern professionalism. 'Well, when it answers, let me know. We need to get some readings.'

'Me too,' Michael was vaguely aware that he was still holding his breath. 'They're in there… I'll let you know.'

'I understand,' she said, and even though it was obvious she didn't, I was nice of her to say so. 'Mister Knight…' if you don't mind, we have some work we need to do if we're ever going to have a prayer of getting this vehicle back on the road, so…'

'Soon.' He said, and with a slightly confused nod, Jessica stepped away from him again. She merged back into the shadows, like someone who didn't really exist. Michael let out a breath he had been holding since her first approach.

Michael steadies his shaking hands and types.

'OKAY. OKAY, NOW WE'RE GETTING SOMEWHERE. NEXT QUESTION, KITT.'

The red line flickers, dies, rises up again. It changes into a curve, then back to a line.

'KITT?'

Like the wavering marker of an electrocardiogram, the line rose and fell. It was like a heartbeat, Michael realised. A heartbeat where one shouldn't exist, not even had KITT currently been a fully functioning computer.

The hair on the back of Michael's hands prickled from static residue as the red line –heartbeat, whatever– became something else. The shape twisting and reforming, like dead pixels congealing on the screen. For just a second, Michael could've sworn the weird shapes forming in the fluctuations were deliberate. In that second, what remained of the already nebulous world around him disappeared.

In his own way, perhaps KITT was giving him an answer.

'KITT? FORGET ABOUT THE QUESTION, JUST TALK TO ME.'

_Crackle._

'KITT?'

_'M…hael…?'

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	3. File: Two

**Spoilers**: Possibly for _Knight Rider: 2000_, but I'm not sure that's continuity.  
**Writer's Note**: The opening line of the fic is quoted from the KITT meme on livejournal, ki2k as written by Vespurrs. I _think_ she replied saying I could use it, but if she didn't then I sincerely apologise and will remove it if requested.  
Also, I had Matchbox 20's _"How Far We've Come"_ in my head all the way through this chapter. That ought to explain a few things.

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**File: Two.**

_There was a storm coming. Soon. _

She would've known about it even if KITT's weather monitoring systems hadn't been as carefully tuned to the climate as they were. She could feel _it. The breeze drifting through the open car's window tasted like lightning and smelled like the ancient candles her grandma used to keep in the kitchen cupboard. Clouds hang on the horizon like a smog of poison, turning the sky into shades of blue and purple all across Mistletoe Valley. (Who the heck had come up with that name, anyway? Shawn keeps thinking that she should have worn her slacks.). It's approximately three pm, but the light makes it feel later. _

This wasn't the storm they were waiting for now, with baited circuit boards and twitching fingers –something Shawn blamed entirely on the chip in her head. The storm she waited for was much closer to home, and much further away in the very same breath.

And no, she wasn't sure what she meant by that, only that she did_ mean it. The storm was _there. _It was there, and it waited, just as they did. It couldn't possibly be measured on KITT's systems and it sure as hell wasn't registering on any of her human ones. _

A shiver of unease ran from hardware, to processor, to human brain and back. She wasn't sure which of them started it. '…Shawn.'

'KITT.' She says, and the next question she doesn't have to ask aloud. 'You okay?' 

KITT paused before answering. His engines seem to let out a quiet whirring noise, more like the kind you'd hear from a computer than a common-or-garden vehicle But then again, KITT was far from being a common-or-garden anything. 

'Perhaps not the most appropriate question. This entire situation is anything but "okay". I feel like the proverbial man jumping into the fireplace. The fire could come at us from any direction… Knowing our luck it'll be from behind.' 

Shawn McCormick forced a smile, fingers twitching for the cigarettes she hadn't touched since high school. 'Don't worry, KITT. You're fireproof, right?'

'Oh, very funny.'

'Relax. Would I be right in presuming that the Knight Industries Four Thousand has a little case of the jitters?'

'Shawn,please._.' _

She laughed. Even with the weight of anxiety, laughing made her feel better. 'I'm sorry. I guess you're right, anyway. It's not normal.'

No. Nothing normal here. What remained of Mistletoe Valley was spread out before them, looking almost exactly like an image from one of its own tourist information boards. Except that the grassy fields and woodlands had been paved over and sealed under tonnes of concrete. Where there used to be a stream there was now just an underground aqueduct designed to channel the water away for security reasons only. No one cared about the landscape anymore, despite the fact that the location had been chosen specifically for its Positive and Encouraging Working Environment.

In the last two weeks, Shawn had read the forms and documents for the construction of the Mistletoe Valley Bio-Laboratory over and over, not honestly caring about the names of the directors and funders and the scientific blueprints. Not caring how much it had cost to construct. All she cared about was why it had been constructed here in the first place.

Mistletoe Valley. What was so important about it, anyway? What was it they were waiting for?

These kinds of thoughts weren't helping her nerves. Once an ex-smoker always an ex smoker, especially at times like this. Typical. 

'It'll be here.' KITT sounded _awfully sure of that, but Shawn was equally certain that he wasn't. Wish it wouldn't, his processors echo. Wish it would stay away. Strange. Too many questions too many things to talk about not enough time too much don't ask me not now don't what are we waiting for anyway? _

'That's the reason it's not okay.' 

'Pretend it is, then.' _She spoke with a nonchalance she didn't feel. There was no point in lying to him, but sometimes, he let her imagine she could. _'Pretend we've done it a million times before. We did our research and now we're… here. Just another day, another bad guy. It'll be alright.'

_She said that, but the truth was she was as jumpy as KITT. _

'But there are_ no adversaries as such, unless you count the potential weather. We're not here to meet an enemy, Shawn… Are we?' _

'No,' Shawn agreed, quietly. For both of their sakes, she hoped she was right to. 'No, KITT, I don't think we are.'

She got out of the driver's seat to stretch her legs and didn't need to tell him where she was going. The chip in her head told him everything he needed to know.

It wasn't mind reading per se_, though certain technicians back at FLAG had compared it to that. Shawn had never needed to explain it to anyone (usually it was enough of a deal just trying to explain why the car could talk) so she wasn't even certain how to vocalise it. It was more like her mind and KITT were two separate entities bound together into a single network, and certain signals could shoot between them, seemingly at random intervals. There would be times where she would feel anger or shock, and KITT's screens and monitors would jump in response, or when she asked KITT to scan an object, and ended up seeing in infra-red herself. And always there was the one, constant sensation, though it had been there for so long now that she hardly noticed it –a kind of beating in the back of her mind, halfway between a heartbeat and an electrical current: _

The thing which alerted KITT to what she wanted without him having to inform her. The thing which alerted her to his physical requirements without need for a damage report. Infallible computerised logic would mix with powerful human instincts, and sometimes, the chip would realise things long before either of them did.

But they were simple and vague explanations. If Shawn wanted KITT to know exactly _what she wanted, she had to tell him word for word just like anyone else. The link was also greatly strengthened by physical proximity, with direct contact being the most efficient means of "communication" (not that the chip had been designed for such things in the first place). Getting out of KITT and stepping away from him gave Shawn a momentary break from any signals. _

Shawn stepped close to the edge of the road and looked down into the valley. Paradise once, but not anymore. The valley is really more of a basin, with deciduous trees still scattered in a haphazard pattern. Most of what had been a natural habitat less than five years previously had now been replaced by steely grey buildings with shining, blacked out windows, surrounded by (currently almost empty) car parks, wooden fences and electrified barbed wire. There were no guard rails here; nothing to hold her should she stumble.

Wind still biting down on her skin, Shawn dared herself to go closer. It wasn't a straight drop down, but it was close – a 45 degree angle tilt across jagged rocks and rubble. Nothing that KITT could gain traction on.

You could fall, a voice said deep in her mind –one which didn't belong to KITT. You could fall, and there would be nothing to catch you.

'Maybe,' Shawn felt herself answer. 'But there's no one here to push me either. And KITT's here.'

Oxymoron, the not-KITT voice added. Shawn chose to ignore it. Wasn't listening to the voices in your head supposed to be the first sign of insanity?

'Are you going to come away from there, Shawn, or am I going to have to chase you over a cliff edge?'

Shawn laughed again. 'You won't be chasing me over anything.'

'Quite true. I know fine well you couldn't manage down there without me.'

It was true, Shawn thought, smiling, but she didn't say this aloud.

'Seriously, Shawn, come away from there. I'm starting to feel like an anxious parent.'

'I don't know whether to be flattered or insulted, KITT.'

A roll of thunder sounded in the distance. Like some kind of perfectly timed, dramatic omen. It took all Shawn's self control not to roll her eyes and bite her tongue (both at the thunder and KITT's comment), but her fingers were still_ twitching for that cigarette. There was a reason these things were omens and clichés, after all. _

'Shawn?'

'Alright, I'm coming.'

She shivered, imagining KITT's systems homing in on the electrical output of the lightning, deciphering its proximity to their current location, imagining him reporting that location back to him, in those exact words as soon as she got back in the car. She focused on that thought –on things that were real and solid and not just the obscure superstitions that had brought them out here.

Superstitions. Right. They were out here chasing ghosts, after all.

And then, there it was. The flicker that she had been waiting for, passing across the facility below. A sensation of static in her spine that could just as easily have been her imagination, until KITT spoke again in an urgent voice:

'Shawn. I'm measuring a burst of unusual activity from—'

'I know KITT,' Shawn cut him off. She knew what he was about to say. 'Are they…?'

'Precisely the same as those we measured earlier at the ridge. I was right,' KITT added calmly, without any signs of boasting. 'It's here.'

Of course.

'…Showtime, then.'

Shawn turned and walked as slowly as she could manage back from the edge of the road. As soon as she touched a hand to KITT's bonnet, a shiver ran right down her spine. She knew it didn't belong to her. It said "not right, not here, not now, not ready".

But it didn't really matter whether KITT was ready. It was going to happen, whether either of them wanted it or not.

And the storm was still coming. Both_ storms. _

'Let's go, KITT.'

So they did, with one push of the gears and one burst from an all-powerful electronic system.

"Showtime" indeed.

* * *

He had been silent for six and a half minutes now.

Silent, but not the uncomfortable low-hanging silence that had existed half an hour before. Now it was the silence of patience and waiting. Michael knew KITT would speak up again, when he felt ready. There was no need to push.

The general tech department wasn't feeling quite so patient. They were still working away in the background, though they felt a lot less like shadows, now, and a lot more like real people. Since he didn't have a clue about the technicalities of this operation, Michael was instead learning to judge what was happening by the surrounding technicians' movements. The faster they moved, the more likely it was that they were all working on something important. Whenever they all began to slow down and get their bearings, he knew some minor/major crisis had passed and they were all winding down before the next one hit. They operated like a massive organ, organized and technically perfect.

But not many of them spoke to KITT.

The Knight Industries had never needed this kind of team working on him before… not like this. Not even when he'd been torn down to mere ribbons. Not even when there had been nothing left of his exterior shell after the accident at the acid pit… There had been Michael; there had been Bonnie, Devon, RC3, and the semi. Michael couldn't remember KITT ever having such a massive technical team on standby. He'd counted at least twenty different white coats, most of who seemed to be regulars here. Jessica said that most of them had been called in for the emergency, but the scale of the whole thing still blew Michael's mind.

He had no idea what they were doing to the AI right now, but he knew from Jessica that KITT's program files and data-coding was currently spread out across ten different stations, with two more dedicated to putting his physical body back together. What remained of the main CPU, the very heart of the Knight Industries Four (Two) Thousand, still sat on the dashboard in front of Michael, wrapped up in a sullen silence, and with most of his systems deactivated and removed for treatment. The main cognitive coding and textual communication system still remained.

KITT hadn't asked about Shawn.

KITT knew. The empty space of a disintegrated microchip must have been speaking volumes. It had driven all the fight and mathematical formula out of him. Shawn was dead, and the fact of it defied KITT's comprehension.

It kind of defied Michael's comprehension, too.

_'Micha…l?'_

STILL HERE, KITT.

They had tried sensory deprivation on him, once. It was a technique rumoured to help the human mind cope with stress for short periods of time, but long term exposure (or lack of exposure, as the case may be) was detrimental to the human psyche. Michael hadn't taken to it. Less than fifty seconds in the tank and he'd wanted the hell out of the thing.

KITT's awareness of the world was accessed through machines. Olfactory sensors, visual sensors and the like. Michael didn't pretend to understand it, but he did know that even a computer-intelligence needed sensory stimulation to survive for long periods of time. Long term sensory deprivation for KITT would likely have been as dangerous as it would be for a human. Bonnie had probably known that this would happen.

LIKE I SAID, I'M NOT GOING ANYWHERE. JUST SIT TIGHT. THEY'RE STILL FIXING YOU. YOU'LL BE ALRIGHT.

In other words, he had to keep talking, just as Bonnie had asked (told) him to. And he would be a whole lot happier if KITT would start answering him again.

There had been other people talking to him before Michael had arrived, a few of them had even come up to the CPU again since KITT had started speaking, clearly glad that the AI was at least trying to communicate with the outside world again, but none of them had been able to prompt as much of a response from him as Michael had.

TALK AGAIN. WHEN YOU'RE READY. THERE'S NO HURRY, LIKE I SAID, I'LL STILL BE HERE.

_'Li…r.'_

Michael hesitated; a little unnerved, and then he remembered that KITT wasn't really capable of etiquette-related subtleties right now. _'Ther… is a ru…h. She's w…iting. Te..nicians. Th…y wa…t you out. Ne…d to w…rk.' _

I KNOW, BUDDY. THEY'RE WORKING FINE, THOUGH. THEY'LL JUST HAVE TO FIX YOU WITH ME HERE.

The silence hung for a while. He'd gotten used to being patient. Either it was taking KITT longer than normal to process each thing Michael said, or the relay of returning information was too slow or something. At first, it had taken between two and three minutes between each answer, but now he was growing more confident, Michael was only having to wait about thirty seconds for each reply.

_'Impai…ent?' _

'WELL, THAT JESSICA'S BEEN GIVING ME LOOKS FOR HALF AN HOUR SO YEAH, I'D SAY THEY'RE IMPATIENT.

_'Jessica…I know J...ssic.' _

OH YEAH? TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT HER, THEN. ANY POINTERS? LIKE WHAT'S HER FAVOURITE FLOWER, FOR EXAMPLE?

There was a pause which felt a lot longer than it probably was. _'…New.' _

YES, SHE TOLD ME THAT.

_'A tran…fer. Basic… Thi… morni…. P…rked in Bay th…ee. Sh…wn park…d Bay four.' _

NEXT TO YOU?

_'Af…rmative. Has d…nted fender. Not m… fau…t.' _

Michael smiled, vaguely.

SURE IT WASN'T. SHAWN'S JUST A RUBBISH DRIVER, IS ALL.

Silence, and it took Michael several seconds to work out what he'd said wrong. He'd forgotten. God in hell, he'd actually _forgotten_. And now he was remembering and that awful sensation in his stomach, something he usually only felt when he thought about Stevie or Devon, returned with a vengeance.

KITT? I'M SORRY.

TALK TO ME SOME MORE. JUST A WHILE LONGER. TRY, KITT.

_'Michael..?.' _

WHAT IS IT, KITT?

_'F…ve minu…es. I… I n…d five… min…..?' _

The first thing Michael thought of to say isn't the kind of thing KITT needed to hear right now (Shawn won't reappear in five minutes, she's gone, you can't fix it in that length of time, you need longer, you need forever, it's too late, I'm sorry we couldn't save here would've tried I would've tried I didn't know stupid idiot why'd she have to die?), so he opts not to, instead, he typed a single word.

OKAY.

Another long silence.

Michael settled back in the remains of the chair, forgetting about the blood. Alright. He could wait.

* * *

'I don't know what you did, but I think I'm about ready to hire you for the psychological department.'

Michael didn't hear her approaching, despite the fact that she was wearing the kind of three inch heels that clattered on the pavement. Around the rear of the FLAG technical department was a shall, curved, slanted over hang reaching down first into a small car park, and then sloped further downwards to the artificial fields and the occasional weeping willow tree. It was a far cry from the Knight Manor and the old Semi Parking lot and had a definite "Working Environment" atmosphere, but Michael found that he liked it out there. Appreciated the peace and quiet. From here, he could see the small Volkswagen with the dented bumper he had created this morning in the front row, sat next to his old chevy.

Jessica had approached him from the exit doors behind and was standing just on his left, three feet away, before he even noticed she was there.

'Uh. No. No, not me.'

'Why not?' She smiled a smile which at any other time Michael probably would have considered "winning" but right now it just remembered him of a deeper, brighter smile on a very different kind of face. 'We couldn't get even a glimmer of a signal before you came in and started talking to it. It's like you flicked a switch with your brain.'

Michael managed another smile himself. 'Trust me, I'm not the person to go to for stuff like that. My idea of psychology pretty much stops at "what's the trout thinking this time? Is he gonna pull the line or surrender to a greater will". And the conclusion is the same either way, of course.'

'You fish?'

'I _try._'

Jessica sat down carefully on the overhang, a coffee cup held carefully in both hands and her lab coat folded around her legs. 'My father used to fish… he never caught much either. I take it we can't get started on the car CPU yet, then?'

Straight down to business.

'No. He's not ready to be poked at with sticks or reeled out on rods and system checkers.' It came out sounding harsher than he had meant it to but Jessica seemed unmoved by both his temper and his resulting guilt. 'If you think it's not the right thing to do right now, then I guess we should trust you, but just remember, Mister Knight, I didn't get this job for trusting non-technicians more than my own judgement anymore than I got it for my people skills.'

'I trust KITT,' Michael said, eventually, sounding surer than he felt. 'I trust that he'll know when it's alright to… resurface, so to speak. Give him your time and he won't take anymore of it than he needs.'

Michael felt himself nodding. That seemed to be the way of many of the people working at FLAG these days – asides from the occasional older technician who had obviously been working with the organization for longer than Michael had been alive. These few men and woman alone seemed to show anything other than _professional_ concern for the Knight Industry Two (Sorry, Four) thousand's welfare. Asides from the immediately obvious, that was the main thing which bothered him about the current _Knight Rider_ team: maximum efficiency with minimum contact.

'People told me about that, you know,' Jessica said. 'About the AI of the Knight Industries Four Thousand.' She frowned into her plastic cup, as if the bottom dredges of her coffee would reveal the secret of the universe if she just stared at them long and hard enough. 'They explained to me about how special it was… or they tried to, anyway; for the most part I didn't get it. "It's more than a machine", they said to me. "You have to work with him to really understand"… And when they called it a _him_…' She sighed. 'That was when I got really confused. I don't think I would've understood –or even believed them– if they'd just said outright that it was a living, sentient car that thought and talked and showed off with fractal calculations and… got scared when people died. Thing is Mister Knight, I'm not sure I _want_ to understand.'

That was… strange. Michael had never met anyone who hadn't wanted to know more about KITT the very second he opened his mouth (so to speak). The very nature of the creature had confused the living hell out of most people, sure, but nobody had ever been really _afraid_ of him.

What actually came out of his mouth was 'call me Michael.' After all, there was no sense in making the newbie feel anymore put out than she already looked, even if he felt like a newbie himself (albeit a seemingly very respected one) in this strange, new FLAG environment. He wondered how much of Wilton Knight's dream, was still bound up in the solemn efficiency of this place since Maddock took over.

'I heard stories as a child, of course, about the old machine, but I was never interested in that. The reason I like machines, Mister Knight… Michael, is precisely because they are machines. Not… oddly shaped people with molecular bonded bodies… though fat lot of good that did it… Him.'

Michael kept his expression convincingly blank. 'What _happened_, Jessica? Just tell me that. That's all I need you to understand right now.'

Jessica cast him a brief gaze, and then shrugged. 'We honestly have no idea, Michael. That's partly why you were called in. The KIFT is kitted out with some fantastic paraphernalia. It blew my mind the kind of things I found them using inside of that machine. I hear…' she swirled the coffee around in the bottom of the cup, as if aware that she was about to broach a hazardous subject. '…That when they dismantled the first machine, the technology that went into it was used to create new medical machinery… I can only imagine how many lives that saved. Thing is,' she smiled, sheepishly. 'For a supposedly indestructible machine, there was an awfully stocky file of back-repairs in FLAG's database. Some of them were fairly massive jobs, including at least two complete reconstructions from the ground up.'

'And I just happened to be behind the wheel on most of those occasions,' Michael almost smiled as he said it.

'Indeed. But it was also the wheel of an older model: the Knight Industries _Two_ Thousand. The vehicles systems and programming, not to mention the molecular bonded shell, have been upgraded massively since that machine was created. The things that happened to the old car shouldn't have even made a scratch on this version.'

Michael thought –but didn't say aloud– that that was probably what a lot of people in the industry had said about KITT the first time.

'I came into work yesterday,' Jessica went on, 'and within a matter of hours, my first real test as a main tier FLAG technician was thrown in front of me… that,' she gestured vaguely in the direction of the laboratory. 'I'd had no time to familiarise myself with the machine since they were out on a mission of some kind at the time, I'd barely even spoken to Shawn via the commlink. And then the emergency call went out… Instead of the most technologically advanced machine to ever be created and given the body of an automobile pulling through the doors, I saw a mangled wreck of a vehicle with blood on the seat.'

'Yeah, I can't imagine that was the greatest way to start your first day,' there was some genuine sympathy for the woman in Michael's voice. He could remember some of the expressions on the faces of technicians in the past who had been expected to bring KITT back from the brink of death, Bonnie being just one of them. And so far as he knew, none of _them_ had ever had to do it on their very first day. 'So you called for help?'

'That's right,' Jessica nodded. 'First from the rest of my department, and then from a renowned professor in the field of cyber-electronics, and the original head field technician for the _Knight Industries Two Thousand_.'

Bonnie Barstow, Michael thought. Though in Jessica's head, he supposed it probably sounded more like "Professor Barstow", or "Ma'am" or something else equally formal and serious. Michael thought he even detected a hint of hero worship in Jessica's tone. 'And you know what the first thing she said to me was?' Jessica started fumbling about in her lab-coat pockets, looking for something or other. At first he thought it was a cigarette, and then it turned out to be a packet of gum. 'Blueberry?'

'Ah… no. No thanks.'

Jessica shrugged, popping a piece into her own mouth and putting what was probably unnecessary force into chewing it. 'Well obviously _that_ wasn't the first thing she said. She asked me: "Is he okay?" And of course, I'd been hearing things like that all _day_, from most of the department… They were always calling it a "he", butI didn't understand. I had been putting it down to the human factor. You know how people say ships are "she's" and hurricanes are "he's"?' Michael nodded but still felt put out. How could such a massive misconduct have taken place at FLAG, of all places? In his mind the fact that KITT was alive should've been drummed into the head of everyone who worked on him from the moment they started the job, yet here was Jessica, seeming utterly stumped about it.

He snapped back to reality, realising Jessica was still talking. '…Still, I'd never heard anyone sound so anxious about just a machine before. I'd heard of people loving their computers, but Professor Barstow sounded so scared… I'd never _heard_ her scared before.' Jessica's frown deepened, her eyes still fixed on her coffee cup. 'I don't think until that point it even dawned on me. And then she told us to call you, and…'

'And I sounded equally freaked out,' Michael winced, remembering the harsh abruptness of that conversion. 'The person on the phone was a guy, though…'

'Yes, that was Robert, another of our main techs… I could hear you from the terminal next to him,' Jessica bit her tongue. 'I had my doubts about calling you in right then, but I'm glad we did. You've worked a small miracle… or helped the people already creating one, at least.'

'I'll take that as a compliment, Miss Matthews.'

'It was intended as one. And call me Jessica.'

'Jessica…' Michael frowned. 'S'kinda formal… What about Jess? Or Jessie, maybe?

'Either choice will see me having to insert a laser scalpel somewhere you don't usually put high-tech objects of that calibre, _Mister Knight._'

He laughed in spite of himself. He'd shaken her hand once today already, but reached out for hers a second time, for good measure. 'Okay, okay, I surrender. Jessica.'

The silence hung for a few minutes longer. Not exactly a comfortable silence, but not entirely uncomfortable either. Michael kept his eyes fixed on the canal running not far past the car park, and what looked like a training running-ground not far out after that. he pictures Shawn in the driver's seat of the gleaming red _Banshee_ KITT had become (ladies car, he had joked to a very indignant KITT at one time). She would smile while running an assault course, he had decided. Smile, but not laugh, the way he used to… softer, and with move control because Shawn was _like_ that, when she wasn't being powered by revenge and sometimes even when she was. Michael wasn't even going to start thinking about The Chip. Shawn would run a good test course, he thought. Her eyes would be set and focussed even with all the adrenaline and KITT wouldn't have to warn her of making errors and glitches as often as he did Michael.

The idea made a bitter taste on the tongue, even as it made him smile.

Michael sometimes doubted the government's reasons for funding an organization such as FLAG in the first place. It was likely that the idea of a crime group "aimed at taking out criminals who operate above the law by bending the law themselves" was what had appealed to them. Te government probably had people getting killed and shot up on their behalf everyday, just to keep a check on things. One of the reasons why Michael hated government procedures- it sure as hell wasn't the paperwork which had gotten him involved with FLAG in the first place. Shawn didn't fit into that category, any better than Michael would have.

He'd started working at FLAG because he'd owe a debt, because he'd had nothing left after having his entire life wiped out in one single, blinding gunshot. He'd kept it up for very different reasons to any Devon had imagined. He'd lost the woman he loved, and then he'd found her, lost her again, quit FLAG and tried to keep her once and for all. And then another gunshot wound had ripped his life apart all over again.

Things had begun to go wrong not long after that. Michael wasn't sure exactly where it all started. Stevie was a hole that no amount of time or beautiful women had been able to heal, but KITT…

KITT had helped. The consciousness that was the Knight Industries Two Thousand. The one single voice that could've stopped him from doing something he regretted and murdering the people responsible for the death of his wife had helped.

And then KITT had gone as well, taking Bonnie and Devon with him. Except that this time, it was Michael who had chosen to do the walking away for reasons known only to himself and maybe KITT, if the AI was really smart enough to work it out. Michael suspected that he was.

Whether he would be again was a different matter altogether.

In the time since his departure, FLAG had changed tremendously. With it's acceptance as the governmental sponsored facility that it was, the good had to be taken with the bad. The good news was that it was more recognized and respected in the law enforcement community and was offered a lot more funding. The bad news was that there were more health inspections, more spot-checks from the governors, and one hell of a lot more paperwork.

'Back to business, whatever your business happens to be?' Jessica asked.

'You heard me alright.

'We'll need the processor eventually,' Jessica said, obviously avoiding using the terms either "he" or "it". 'How uh… soon can we get started, would you suppose?'

'We've been through this…'

'I know, I know. As long as it takes. Then take as long as you need, Mister Knight, but just remember we have a lot of work to do here besides just fixing a broken machine. There's paperwork to be filed, people to be informed… and provided we can get this thing up and running again in the future, then… eventually, we'll be needing a new driver'

Michael swallowed, wondering why the words "new driver" stung a lot more this time than they had the last.' They're thinking about that? Now? Right now?'

Jessica spat out her chewing gum in an action that seemed unusually casual, for her. 'Well, not right now, but soon. The project can't just be discarded, not in a delicate stage like this.'

'But… For Christ's sakes, Jessica, Shawn's been dead for less than forty eight hours!'

'And she left behind her an unsolved case, and a car without an owner,' Jessica said, carefully. 'I'm sorry she's dead too, Michael. But either we refit the car and reacquaint it with a new driver, or the FLAG project gets scrapped. Neither of us want to see that happen, especially not you.'

Michael, momentarily chilled by the thought of KITT being taken apart and sold for scrap, made into iron lungs and security equipment and hell knew what else; felt the bitter taste on his tongue was getting worse by the second.

He needed to get back to KITT. For some reason, he felt that now more than ever before, even though he'd left the building just to get _away_ for a few minutes. He also really wished that Bonnie's plane would hurry the hell up and get here already. She must've at least taken off by now, which left a good four and a half hours before she reached California. He'd pick her up, he decided. Then at least there'd be one thing in the airport she was happy to see.

'In that case, I need to talk with your boss.'

'With Maddock? I think I could arrange that… That is if you're not already able to command the department with one word,' Jessica looked curious, scrunching her plastic cup up in one hand. 'What do you want to talk about? Thinking of volunteering? Please don't take offence, Michael, but I would be reluctant to stick anyone older than twenty five or so behind the wheel of that car in its complete form.'

Michael sucked in a breath between his teeth. 'I never said that. But I want involved this time. I won't just walk away and watch them do whatever they pleased with him. Maddock going to hear me out this time.'

'He didn't last time?'

Michael let out another sharp breath, patting a hand on her shoulder as they both turned back into the tech building. 'Jessica, you have no goddamn idea.'

* * *

_His skin was burning. _

No. not his skin. He didn't have anything like that. His shell was inflammable, untouchable, impregnable, the windows are up and sealed tight, the laser restraint system was secured and had been obsessively verified as functioning, and yet he could still hear wire filaments bursting and cracking in important internal systems and his skin_.. _

No. Not his. Shawn's skin.

'KITT??!' 

It's screaming. Screaming, and hurting and the ground is shaking, like massive roots are trying to emerge beneath him and throw them both skywards. Maybe that was exactly what was happening. It was hard to be sure. His visual sensors had been knocked out. There was no response from his auditory processors. The only thing he could hear was Shawn and that wasn't difficult, seeing as she was screaming in his head. There were colours at first –many bright colours, glaring and screaming in signal, wavelength forms, before they too were cut out and quietened.

KITT! **KITT!!!**

His name.

It was his name, and Shawn was calling it. He tried to think what Shawn could stand for, then he remembered it wasn't an anagram. It was a person of flesh and blood, and that flesh was burning even as he struggled to apply breaks which were no longer attached to the pavement below. If there was even any pavement left at all. it felt as if the world had just disintegrated then and there, leaving behind a horrible pounding sensation, like an earthquake.

He didn't respond well to these signals. Couldn't tell where Shawn's ended and his began. His speedometer continued to crank upwards into speeds he didn't know he was capable of, but it wasn't his wheels turning on the non-existent ground.

KITT, go back, we can't—!!!

It wasn't his body_ anymore. _

But then there was the screech of metal tearing. Impossible. The Knight Industries Five Thousand did not tear. It didn't bleed._ It wasn't breakable like that. _

He demanded answers from broken networks. Demanded explanations for the light that came out of something other than his own sensors and the commotion tearing at the heart he didn't have, ripping at the lungs he didn't breathe through.

Not his lungs. Not his breath. Panic. 

**'SHAWN!'**

_Emergency signals and strategies were firing into a silent blackness now, for there was no one remaining to catch them and respond. _

'My fault. My fault… no…

'Oh, god, KITT I'm sorry.'

* * *


	4. File: Subsidiary

**This is what I believe is known as an **_**o-make**_**, (also known as Scarab buying some time to think about how she's going to write the next chapter) taking place during the events of the last chapter. This is not technically a chapter in and of itself.  
**

**So, anyone wanna try and guess which song was in my brain throughout this bit? Well, in case you can't, it's added at the end (because I am an old softy of magnanimous proportions like that). Standard disclaimers apply. Reviews and concrit are, as always, very much appreciated. **

**

* * *

**

Initial.  
File: _Subsidiary One._

He couldn't think.

That was all. There was a strong and utterly strange blue light, a spattering of other colours and words before his visual sensors died out altogether, and then he couldn't _think_.

Or more appropriately –he could think, on the most basic level imaginable (the "I think, therefore I am not yet destroyed" level), but what was the point in that? There were no signals returning from his visual sensors, auditory processors or memory recall bubble chip system. He couldn't access any of his databanks with all their thousands of carefully categorised and instantly accessible megabits of information. Almost all of his most fundamental systems were offline, or otherwise not returning any of the requests he sent out to them. He couldn't even perform the fractal calculations that they usually gave him to work through, during those periods in the past when they'd had to detach him from his body. He had no recallable past, he had no prospective future.

There was nothing for him to think _about_.

But there was something to _feel_, at least.

_Miss Matthews, I think we're almost done over here.' _

'Excellent. Does that mean you demand a coffee break?'

'Um, well...'

'Relax, Tom, I'm only joking. The repairs are complete?'

'Ah, yes, this uh... this circuitry is nearly completed, I just need Claire to get her job done and we can try reattaching them to the CPU system, give the poor thing some memory back.' 

Curious.

It was curious. He told himself this over and over simply to distract him from all the other things he could've called it. Underneath the terror and boredom and lack of understanding, this was just another conundrum –another puzzle to be worked through and solved with whatever means were necessary. He knew he had faced such puzzles before, though him memory banks were not functioning well enough to tell him exactly when and why.

He had no idea what his power reserves looked like at the moment, but he imagined they couldn't honestly be as depleted as they felt. A human might compare the sensation to having their body encased in lead and rendered beyond their control. He'd had these kinds of sensations before, but he wouldn't know about any of those times. He couldn't recall the associated memories.

Blackness was not a comfortable sensation, so he was glad when he felt a tweaking in his auditory processors. Something returned to him, and it took him several seconds to work out that he was _hearing_ things again.

_'One more bit-reattachment here aaand... there!' _

'Sounds like a success.'

'It is, the Entymonic Equaliser system is back online and running at eighty seven percent.'

'...The Entymonic Equaliser?'

'Yes, ma'am. Okay, I mean I know it all still looks a mess, but looks can be deceiving. The circuitry is reattached and restored, and it wasn't actually half as badly damaged as we thought it was, so...'

'Oh. Wonderful, Jackson, now how about we try and get something which is actually the slightest bit useful_ working as well, huh?' _

'I... sorry, I thought it was useful.'

'Tom, it's am auditory processing system, not a life support. I thought I assigned everyone to get on with repairing the memory-connections and re-establishing a basic power supply?'

'Well, you did_ tell us that, ma'am but...' _

'But what?'

'Well... he needs to hear_, I mean he's probably going crazy in there...' _

'...Oh.'

'Uh, Miss Matthews?'

'...Nothing, Tom. Good job, just... I forgot for a minute. Carry on.' 

Still no memory. Still no way of accessing his databanks, but hearing things made a difference. It gave him something to focus on besides the most fundamental signals of a sentient life and made him feel less comatose.

He could _feel_ now, too: several sensations were permeating other than just those coming from his hearing sensors, including some things that he was fairly sure shouldn't have been there. A strange, soft glow was echoing against him. It felt the way blue light might feel, touching against a surface skin he wasn't entirely comfortable in. The sensation frightened him, but at least it _was_ a sensation. Something (anything) was better than nothing, even if that something was painful. With his self diagnostic systems offline (he _had_ self diagnostic systems?) he was unable to tell precisely what was broken. He could only wait, and become aware of each breakage after it had been restored. They could be taking him apart again and he wouldn't have known.

Restored. Broken. He was being repaired, and it _hurt_. Strange, a part of him commented. Pain was something he shouldn't have been able to feel at all. Or at least, not like this. Not physically, permeating him deep inside of his mind where nothing but his own consciousness should be able to reach.

What was fixing him, anyway?

_'Wait, where did you leave Mister Knight, didn't he arrive a few minutes ago?' _

'Yes, Jessica, he's up there now.'

'...What? Up there? On the platform?'

'Yes, ma'am, but you can't see him from here because of the lights. He was very persistent and I told him it wouldn't be a problem. I know he's safe, ma'am... I hope that's alright.'

'Hm. Looks like it's going to have to be, isn't it? Alright I had better go talk to him about this before he starts trying to fix things himself. What on earth he thinks he's accomplishing up there I have no idea.'

'I think he's talking to it, ma'am. Well, typing.'

'Uh-huh, and he does_ know that its textual interpretation systems are still offline too, right?' _

'Um... actually, no he doesn't, but we're working on them. If we're really lucky he'll start getting a response soon.' 

Knight.

The word he had heard triggered something. Something which could not possibly have been stored in one of his memory files, or else he couldn't have accessed it, not with all his systems offline. Not unless the name "Knight" was somehow associated with a file all of its own – a file which had not been deactivated when the rest of his memory systems were. He tried desperately to access some message or reference to the word "Knight", but his exact understanding of the word and its meaning remained inaccessible.

_'Hey! Hey, Tom, did you see that?' _

'If by "that" you're referring to that little flicker of activity in the memory recall banks which suggests that the entity in question is trying to access it's memory files and failing_ due to lack of power—' _

'But making the attempt nonetheless.'

'—Then yeah, I sure did. Looks like you were right after all, Claire; we still have activity here.'

'Oh, KITT, that's it little guy, you keep trying.' 

KITT.

If there was one thing he still knew, it was his name, even if he couldn't quite explain where that name had come from. Still lead like. Still not even close to functioning normally, but feeling a lot more human now (so to speak: he was actually fairly certain that he was anything but human). His mind was filled with holes and recesses that he almost feared being refilled.

_'Hey, Alex? Alex, check it out, KITT's trying to access his memory files.' _

'No kidding? Well that proves the thing still has its cognitive ability.'

'I told you he was still in there guys, I told_ you!' _

'What, did I say I didn't believe you?'

'Honestly, Claire, you two should just adopt the damn AI already.'

'If there's anything left of it to_ adopt by the end of this.' _

'Oh, Mark, shut up, you know I'll tell him you're saying that.' 

Somehow he understood now. He had not simply been deactivated. This was not just his awakening and rising up out of a hibernation state. Something had happened before all of this blackness and pain. Something had _attacked_ him. Something had _hurt_. It was _still_ hurting.

_'I knew it was a good idea to bring Knight in.' _

Knight.

_'Why? We're the ones doing all the damn work; I haven't taken a coffee break in twelve hours here.' _

'I said _he'd make a difference, didn't I? Well I'm telling you he's doing just that. This "damned AI" is still alive, and_ still_ fighting so just get back to your terminal already and worry about your coffee break later.' _

'Yes, yes of course. Man, ten years of experience on us and they think they know it all.'

'Ten years? Ha. I was here when Bonnie Barstow was still in FLAG employment, Decutt, I'll show you what I know about this machine.' 

Bonnie. Barstow. The words clung to him in the same was as "Knight" did, but he still didn't have the memory capacities available to explain to him why. He still couldn't access the necessary files and even if he could have, he wasn't sure he had the power to perform a search. He kept listening to the voices instead. Focusing on the words and trying not to care about their meanings. So long as they were there and real, that was enough for him.

_'Claire, still working on your end'? _

'Trying, Jessica, but we still can't activate any of his memory logs... something's blocking them.'

'Hm. I wonder what that_ could be now.' _

'Sorry, Jessica?'

'Nothing. Knight said something to me and... Well, I guess I'm just being tired and crotchety. It's uh… likely that the remaining circuitry which wasn't blown to shreds is still out of line, don't you think? Try accessing it's closed off memory modules through a different channel, we'll have to get in there one way or another.' 

No thoughts. No nothing except for the sound. He wasn't sure who or what it was that had gotten his hearing back online, but he was grateful. It gave him something to concentrate on besides the cold black silence in his head. And his power levels were rising now, too. He could feel them steadily creeping upwards a little bit at a time.

There was a positive to all this, then. Not being dead was always a positive.

_'What about his memory bubbles? Can you restore them from backup? _

'I'm not sure, I don't think those systems are normally tampered with, for obvious reasons... I'm not sure how it works.'

'Hm. You're new here too, huh? Well then, Robertson, looks like we're both going to have to learn real fast, aren't we? Don't worry; I'll instruct you with what I do know...'

'Well, okay... in that case, I think we can manage, Ma'am.'

'Good. Then do it now, and let's bring this piece of machinery back to life.' 

Something inside of KITT's circuitry seemed to buzz and tremble, running on far too low a level of power, but running nonetheless. And then there were memories. Thoughts. Understandings. Within the cold blackness, a floodgate seemed to open. He remembered.

His speech-rendering faculties felt as dead and non-functional as most of the rest of his systems were, and yet, KITT still found himself screaming.

OKAY. OKAY, NOW WE'RE GETTING SOMEWHERE. NEXT QUESTION, KITT.

He already knew that he wasn't remembering everything – there were hours of blank memory chips still unfulfilled– but it was enough. Enough for KITT to know that something was terribly wrong. Enough to know that one individual who should have been there no matter what no longer existed. For what was perhaps the thirtieth time (his calculation systems were broken too) he called out for Shawn and the signal echoed back from nothing. There was no one there. No Shawn. No nothing.

KITT?

Shawn. Designation: His driver. The _Knight Rider_ version two-point-oh. She should have been here, and yet the microchip which KITT knew (now) should have bound the two of them together as securely as wires and cables could was nowhere to be found. This thought terrified him even more than the strange, heavy feeling of his wrecked outer shell and the detached sensation of his own mind and consciousness being currently spread out over seven different work stations as the FLAG technicians struggled to repair him.

KITT? FORGET ABOUT THE QUESTION, JUST TALK TO ME.

He forced himself to ignore the chip's absence for a second –as long as it took for him to access a newly reopened log explaining just who that voice belonged to.

KITT?

Knight.

KITT understood what that word meant now. Designation: Michael Knight. Knight Rider version one-point-oh. Retiree. Michael. Not Shawn, but someone. Someone who (left went away stopped ended it but came back so it's alright now not angry with him yet) mattered.

KITT struggled to reactivate his vocal synthesisers, working desperately with what little power he had to latch onto the only thing which felt even remotely like it belonged in the here and now.

_'...M...chael?' _

KITT, IS THAT YOU?

_'...M...chael.' _

A pause. Then something (someone. Michael. It was Michael) began to chuckle. KITT didn't feel much like laughing with them, no matter how relieved it sounded. 'KITT…'

His mind still hurt, which wasn't right. It _couldn't_ be right. He wasn't _capable_ of feeling pain. It wasn't in his programming. Even with such a massive, microchip-shaped gap inside of him, he knew it shouldn't hurt and he had countless systems and byways set up to prevent such sensations interfering with his actions.

But none of this explained why they did.

'Yeah. Yeah, KITT it's me. What the heck have you gotten yourself into now, huh, buddy?'

* * *

**You know, Vienna Teng does a great version of "**_**Cannonball"**_**, but I really shouldn't listen to it while writing stuff like this, I'm sappy enough as it is without mawkish assistance. **


	5. File: Three

**Looking at the reactions to the last chapter, I have to say I'm glad I decided to lighten things up a little this time around. Also, I needed a nice dose of Bonnie right about now, to go with my tea. Yum. **

**  
****And how the hell is a girl supposed to write automobile grief? Seriously, how?**

**Standard disclaimers apply.**

* * *

Initial.  
File: Three.

_'Good morning once again, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, as you can probably tell we have now cleared the take off area and are in transit to California. The current flight time is four hours and thirteen minutes and it's looking to be a clear sky all the way with a beautiful sunrise in just under three hours. Drinks will be served momentarily and breakfast will be provided. The crew apologises but due to a technical fault we will not be able to provide an in-flight movie at this time. We hope you have a pleasant flight with Trans Atlantic National Airlines.'_

'Hey um, miss? Lady, are you alright there?'

'I... what?!'

'Sorry, it's just that I couldn't help but notice that you seem kinda... jumpy. So either you're trying to remember... I dunno, whether you turned off the gas, or something like that, or else you're just not the flyin' type.'

'Oh... well, it's the latter, is it that obvious?'

'Well, the funny lookin' face and the shaking fingers kinda gave it away... Ah not that I'm looking at your fingers or that you're usually funny lookin', I... Well, the name's McIntyre. Gifford McIntyre, founder of McIntyre's Tyre Replacements, Massachusetts.'

'Um... Barstow, Bonnie Barstow, Harvard.'

'No kid, as in Harvard University? That classy school with a-thousand-dollar-per-day fees?'

'Well it's... not exactly _that_ expensive.'

'Hey, don't look at me, I don't ask questions I wouldn't wanna answer myself, you know. Still gotta wonder what they pay people in that place, though. Seems I got sat next to the brainy one this time, huh? I usually get the guy who falls asleep in the first half an hour of the flight and doesn't stop snoring until we touch-down. So um... flying isn't your thing?'

'I... I can't say that it is, no. Excuse me, may I...?'

'What? Oh, sure, sure, I'm not reading it, but you know it's just the safety regulations.'

'T-that's okay, I'll just look at the pictures.'

'Oh-kay then... So um... you visiting someone? Pretty gal like you probably has a boyfriend waitin' for her on touchdown, eh?'

'Well... I guess I am. Visiting someone, that is. Not exactly a social call, but...'

'Must be a pretty big someone, for you to be out here braving the wilds of Atlantic Airways... Uh, except of course it's not really all _that_ dangerous, you know these days more people die in car crashes than on aeroplanes, and in train and road crashes, too. I saw this real humdinger once, out near Arizona.'

'R-really, all the way out there?'

'Yup. Head on collision between this huge semi, a black Pontiac and a roadblock of about fifty police cars. Whole thing came flying outta nowhere and then –trust me, this is the but you just ain't gonna believe– then the car just hops into the air like in belongs there and _jumps_ right over the top of the whole damn blockade! I tell ya, I couldn't freakin' believe my eyes.'

'Oh.. .well I… can imagine you didn't, no.'

'Yeah and that kinda thing is just what's happening on the roads, what with all these young punk drivers. You're so much safer in the air, these days. I mean, they have some fantastic safety procedures, what with those standing demonstrations and the little guidance cards with all the diagrams, and the lifejackets... Not that we're gonna be needing life jackets on an inter-continental flight but, hey, we might fly over Lake Michigan or something, y'think? So uh... who's the special guy?'

'The…special guy?'

'You know, the guy you're braving your worst fears for here. He'd _better_ be special, puttin' a gal like you through this.'

'…How long do you have?'

'Ha! Pretty much the whole four hour flight, sugar. Me, I'm going to see my kid. He's studying too, over in California. Not that I think you're studying, something tells me you ain't a learner at that fancy university place, huh?'

'Ah... no, I'm a lecturer there. In the cybernetic research department.'

'Cybernetics, huh? Is that some kind of a science deal? Ha. Figures, you know you've got educational authority written all over ya... Been teaching long?'

'That... depends on what you mean by— what was that?'

'Oh, that? That's just the turbulence you start getting it at about this height, no worries, we're not crashing or anything. Besides if we were the little red lights would come on to warn us.'

'Oh, well that's... that's reassuring to know, thanks.'

'Anyway, so you're a doctor-type or a professor or something, huh? Man, what I wouldn't give for a job like that. I barely graduated high school, wouldn't last two minutes in an institute of higher learnin'. Peanut?'

'Um... no thank you, I don't think I could stomach them right now.'

'That bad, huh? Trust me, sweetheart, I've done this three times a year for the last three years running and you're safe as houses up here. That is, providing you're not scared of horror movies... For some reason they seem to play a lot of horror movies.'

'That's a lot of flight plans. I really don't think I could do this that often... in fact I wouldn't be doing it now, if... well. It's complicated.'

'Ohh. Heh, ain't it always? You don't need to explain to me, lady, I get it now. I got one myself.'

'R-really?'

'Yeah. Two, actually, but the second isn't quite out of the radio controlled cars and tantrums phase yet, you know?'

'Oh. Well I... think one of them never really grew out of the cars. I... it's kind of...'

'Complicated?'

'Yes. Complicated. Better not to get me started on it.'

'Better not... You know, it never made sense to me.'

'Made sense?'

'Why the kids can't ever seem to find themselves a decent university in the same state they grew up in. Can't just get a nice safe retail job in some familiar corner of the world, oh no, "I've gotta go out there, dad" he says. "Learn some wisdom, see the world!" Ha. Throw some wild parties where his parents can't walk in on him and his girl, more like. Now he's off in some place where they might as well be speakin' a different language for all you can understand their accents and probably the only thing he's learnin' is how to get Real Dept Real Fast at the casinos. "See the World" indeed... So anyway, I figure was bein' kinda presumptuous earlier: you got any?'

'I'm... sorry, what?'

'I asked about kids. If it ain't a cute date you're going out there for then it must be a little 'snapper of your own. Your kid studying too? Gotta be, what with a high ranking teacher like you for a mom, huh?'

'Oh... no. I mean yes. I mean... sort of.'

'Oh-kay, so... how many of these "sort of kids" do you have?'

Um, one... Or two, I think. But I haven't been back in such a long time, and... Well. A long time... almost feels like forever. And I haven't seen them…'

'Oh... hey, are you alright? I haven't said anything to upset you, have I?'

'...M'fine.'

'I-I'm sorry, are you freaking out? Should I call the flight attendant, do you need oxygen? Hold on, maybe I've got a paper bag here or some tissues or something...'

'No, no its fine I just... it's a combination of things, t-this is just the straw that broke the camel's back, I'm really alright.'

'Hey, it's not fine, lady, you're _crying_… Oh. _Oh,_ I get it. This is an emergency trip or something, isn't it? Ah, Doc, don't you worry, these kids, they're always getting themselves into one screw up or another it's all ambition and no brainwork with them. I mean I'd bet my last dime that you did just the same kinda things when you were their age, eh?'

'A-actually no.'

'Oh. Well, it's... it's not like you can choose which of your qualities they pick up, right?'

'Hm. I suppose you can't... Damn it, this is ridiculous. This really isn't like me at all.'

'Hey, honey, not so very long ago I would've said that travelling Trans Atlantic three times a year wasn't me either, but just look at what I'm doin' now. Dunno why the kid can't get his butt in gear, get a job, pay for a flight back home and save me the journey but... well... Guess things just didn't work out that way, is all. You can never really leave 'em on their own. And trust me; know it alls who know nothing about the real world they may be, but these kids aren't total basket cases. 'Specially not yours, I'll bet. I mean yours probably has all the brains you've got, right?'

'R-right... I suppose so. But it's so strange... even after all this time, you still worry.'

'You're telling me. Kid's eh?'

'Yeah... Kids.'

* * *

* * *

One thing was for sure; it had been longer than five minutes.

Michael tried not to worry about that. KITT was fine (relatively speaking anyway), he just wasn't... talking. A few lights were flickering in the unnaturally concave dashboard, but they weren't much to speak of, and Michael couldn't be certain what any of them stood for anymore.

The last he checked there had been no physical sensors located on any of KITT's internal systems (or at least there hadn't been in the last model) so patting his dashboard shouldn't have made a blind bit of difference to him, but Michael did it anyway.

_'M...hael?'_

'Yeah, KITT, don't worry, I'm back. Toldya I'd give you five minutes, didn't I?'

He grit his teeth as he said that. He'd actually been away a lot longer than just five minutes, but with Maddock not in his office and not contactable on any of the foundation's usual frequencies, he was proving to be a pain in the ass to track down, and Michael had spent a good half an hour trying to get hold of him.

_'...Know. Jus... check...ng.' _

Thank god for vocal and audio restoration. Michael had been getting kind of impatient with typing into the damn control panel. 'You know they could've told me that they'd fixed your vocal recognition systems sooner. Felt kind of silly having to use that little typing screen.'

_'Mi...ael, I appear to hav... a probl...m.'_

Michael tensed. 'Yeah, what is it?'

_'I can't ...m...ve.' _

'Oh. Yeah, I... I don't imagine you can, buddy,' Michael coughed. He'd never been one for subtlety, but for once, he was well aware of the delicacy of the situation. Plus, he'd never had to explain to someone that their body and mind were currently spread out to all four corners of a laboratory as different people tried to repair different parts of it all at the same time. The Foundation Technical Laboratory gave a whole new meaning to the phrase "intensive care". (Something which made the fact that it could just as easily be converted into an "automobile morgue" all the more disturbing. The thought of KITT being cut up and taken to pieces right here in this laboratory sent chills down Michael's spine.)

_'Hard to... f...el. Is th...re s...mthing wron... with my sens...r equiptme...t?'_

'I... no, not exactly. You're just...' _in a few places at once right now_, he didn't say aloud. '...A little messed up right now. You're alright, though. They're just trying to patch you up and they... had to take a few things apart first to do it.'

_'Th…y disman...led me.'_

KITT's reaction to this was just what Michael had suspected it would be: anxiety, bordering on panic. The car having been taken to pieces once before, Michael had no doubt KITT didn't want to go through it again. The mostly dead lights of his dashboard seemed to flicker.

'Easy, KITT. It's not like that this time, I promise, they're not going to destroy you, they... they're not.'

_'Yo... aid... f...x.' _

'Yeah, I did. There was an accident, you were... damaged, and now they're putting you back together. And that's alright, yeah? I'm right here, aren't I? I'm not going anywhere.'

Silence for well over forty seconds. Michael kept tapping his fingers against the remains of the dashboard. The red flickering light of KITT's vocal modulator trembled as he gazed at it.

_'List...n. After the last c...se we had. Devo… left. Bonnie …eft. Th... damag... they sa…d it w...sn't worth repair...ng... No dri...er. No pr...ject. Stuck in... stor...ge. Ne...r came o...t.'_ KITT's voice was still broken and wavering, but Michael understood every word as clearly as if he'd had a chip inside of his head, too.

'But you did come out of there. You did. We _found_ you.'

_'You we...en't there th...n.'_

And there it was. The accusation that Michael swore was going to keep coming back to haunt them, maybe for the rest of his life. The reason why he tried his hardest to stay away from this newly run and organized FLAG, which bore only the vaguest of resemblances to the Foundation he'd signed up for twenty five years ago. Their mistake. KITT's death sentence.

'Listen, KITT... we've been over this. I know I screwed up, hell, maybe we all did, but that was then and this is now and if anyone even things of trying anything like that then I'll be the one taking them to pieces, you hear me?'

_'I ...an't... move. Michael, I mu...t look an abso...ute mess.'_

Michael smiled faintly. 'Well you ain't ready to strut your stuff at a daredevil show, put it like that, buddy.'

_'Let me re...hrase the sent...ence. I_ need _to ...ove. Now. I... an't.'_

'Sorry, but not gonna happen right now.'

_'But th...y're_ pok...ng_ me.'_

Hearing this, yet another little glimmer of memory made Michael want to smile and scowl in the same breath. Twelve years ago, he had sat by a little girl's bed in the back of an ambulance and held her hand while she whimpered over needles and other sharp things being stuck into her skin. Whimpered, but never cried, not even when the condition had made the vessels in her eyes burst and bleed. Becky had never once shed a tear, not in all the time Michael knew her, because she knew what needed to be done and was prepared to let the doctors do it, no matter how much pain it caused her. She was always brave like that.

But she hadn't liked being _poked_. She hadn't liked the needles and the doctor's tools and the lights they used to shine in her eyes. She hadn't liked it when, after her operation, the doctors hadn't let her hold the phone so she could talk to Black Beauty.

In some ways Black Beauty and Becky were alike.

'I know, I know... KITT, I'm saying you were pretty beaten up. Actually, um...' He pondered whether or not to say it. After all, wasn't it kind of like telling someone when they'd lost an arm or leg? Shouldn't it have been painfully obvious enough without them needing the reminder? '...You um... You don't have wheels _to_move with, right now. Or for that matter, much of an external chassis. I'm afraid you're not goin' anywhere'

_'Wel… yo... certain...y know how to mak... so...eone fe...l better.' _

The silence hung for what felt like forever, but was probably only two or three minutes. Michael reminded himself that this was absolutely nothing in comparison to the hours upon hours of dead unconsciousness that KITT had been going through earlier. For an AI, two or three minutes alone must've felt like an eternity. _'Ca...ght an... fish?'_

Michael half smiled. At least KITT remembered one thing. 'You kidding? I didn't even get a bite. I'm starting to think there aren't even any in the lake and the guys at the bait store are just cashing in their retirement on me.'

_'Or ... aybe you're j...st a bad f...erman.' _

'Aren't you a regular riot? I'll have you know the fisherman's gene has been in my family for generations, it's just a little rusty.'

Michael waited patiently for a crack about how he'd never picked up a fishing rod in his life before Devon talked him into it, and how every member of his family had been in the law enforcement agency before that and probably couldn't even tell a fly line from a tackle box, but it never came.

_'Wh... are y...u here?' _

...Good question. Michael tried very hard to think of an answer which didn't damage either of their prides but one never came. Pride had pretty much gone out of the window the moment Robert had placed the call to him several hours ago.

_'Michael?'_

'Because they asked me to come here.' He muttered. KITT seemed satisfied enough with that answer, or maybe he was just too tired to argue. Either way, the silence was better than having to delve into it again.

Michael had sworn he'd never set foot in a FLAG institute again since he'd handed the wheel over to Shawn. Then when the tech department placed the call to him about the accident, he had gone into automatic and driven the entire two hundred miles back to California with just a single rest stop. Now however, knowing that KITT probably hadn't performed his last ever turbo boost, his sense of ill ease about the place was gradually creeping in again.

KITT was alive. That was all that Michael needed (wanted) to know. He didn't care much about anything else to do with FLAG.

And yet, here he was.

_'W...at hap...ened?' _

'Actually, buddy, I think they were rather hoping you could tell them that. They just found you, over in a place called Mistletoe Valley, near to some kind of bio-laboratory. You remember that?'

'_I...egative. Michael... where's Shawn?'_

Michael winced visibly, for once feeling glad that KITT's vital monitoring systems were as "out of alignment" as the rest of his body. The last thing he wanted to do right now was explain this all over again. The last thing he wanted to do was remind the both of them of Shawn's disappearance and Shawn's blood on the seat beneath him.

'KITT, look, I...'

_'W...at is it? I can't... find her. Michael, the ...hip. I should at le...st be ab...e to locate t... chip.'_

'KITT...' Michael mentally struggled for a moment between just coming out with the truth, or trying to divert the subject away from Shawn for a while. The last thing he wanted to do was say anything that sent KITT's systems back into shut down, and given what he knew about KITT, it was entirely possible that could happen. 'Listen... try to think about where they found you for a moment. A place called Mistletoe Valley... you remember what I said about that? Do you know what you and Shawn were doing out there?'

_'N...tive. I d...n't remembe... Whe...'s Sha...n?'_

Michael sighed. He should've figured it would be impossible to distract KITT from anything. He remembered the last time he had been ripped apart like this. Even with Michael in the room, the only person he had really wanted to see was Bonnie. Had panicked when he thought she'd vanished.

No Bonnie now.

'Okay,' Michael let out a breath as slowly as he could manage. 'Okay, that's fine... it's alright, don't worry about any of that right now. Just tell me what you do remember, tell me... tell me about FLAG, KITT. Can you do that for me? Refresh my memory on the important stuff.'

_'...F...dation o... Law a... Gov...ment... abbrevi...ion FLAG.'_ A pause. _'...I kno...w wh...t that is... I do know that, do...'t I?'_

'Sure you do. And you know where you are now, right?'

_'Aff...rma...ive. We are at FL...G. Acce...sing mem...ry files for the F...dation for L...w and ...overnment, acronym FLAG, years 84-thro...h-90.'_

Something on the dashboard reacted, sand Michael thought he saw the technicians scattered below him start to act up just a little bit, as if something had caught their attention. It was a little further back than Michael had been expecting KITT to go, but he didn't comment. He stayed silent, waiting as KITT reeled off a series of familiar names and numbers.

_Unveil...ng of the _Knight R...der _Project occ...red in 1982, brainc...ild of Wilt…n Knight o… Kn…ght Enterpris…es. Off...ial sanction unde... ...overnmental law did not occ…r until two years lat...r.'_

'KITT...'Michael started to argue, then stopped himself. This was probably the longest sentence KITT had been capable of speaking in hours, so interrupting it probably wasn't a good idea.

_'Technical standby team of that period equalled sixteen, including driver. Number of main technicians on regular field duty: One. Number of advisory technicians to main field duty: Zero. Identity of Main field cybernetic technician: Doctor Barstow, Bonnie. In duty through years 82 to 90, currently employed at Harvard University's Cybernetic department as tutor and senior lecturer... Head of Foundation for Law and Government: Mister Devon Miles. Currently...'_

KITT cut off. The previously glimmering lights and diodes seemed to die out altogether again. Michael tightened his grip on the dash.

_'Oh.'_

'I... yeah that kind of wasn't what I was trying to find out,' Michael bit his lip a little too hard for comfort. Wonderful. He'd been trying to distract KITT from the death of one person and had just ended up reminding him of another.

_'Devon...'_

'Yeah. God, KITT, I'm sorry, I...'

_'It was...'t his t...me to go, was i...?'_

'It... No, it wasn't, but there wasn't any pain. He didn't hurt. He died in his sleep.'

_'But h... wa... murder...d. Devon was ki...ed. We have to st...p them.'_

'We did that, KITT. We did that a long time ago, do you understand? Devon was killed, but we caught the people responsible. We ended all that and now they're right where they belong.' Serving term in a high security prison with bread and water and not a cryogenic chamber in sight. Michael smiled in spite of the conversation. If one good thing had come out of Devon's death, it was the ending of that ridiculous supposed "punishment".

_'But he's st...l dead, is...'t he?'_ KITT's tone wavered even more than usual. _'I for...ot. I ca...'t believe I forgot th...t.'_

'It's alright, buddy...' Michael swallowed. 'Sometimes I forget as well. It's easier than you think... to wake up and not realise what's changed. It's alright.'

_'Is Shawn de...d, too? Is that w...y I can't acce...ss th... chip? Is t...at why you...e here?'_

'KITT, listen to me—'

_'... No.'_

'KITT—'

_**'No.'**_

That was pretty much that. The voice modulator of the Knight Industries Two Thousand fell still and silent. Below, the technicians stirred in newly roused confusion, seeking answers for the flickering on all of their screens.

Not the best way to educate someone in the processes of grief. Michael grit his teeth, leaned back in the chair, and tried very hard not to think about the blood beneath him.

* * *


	6. File: Four

**Alright, alright, enough of the angst already, my mental state can't take it! XD.**

**  
And hey, what do you know, I got through a chapter without a homage to someone else's work... No doubt this will suck, for lack of logical grounding, but hey, if you think that's bad now just wait until later chapters.

* * *

**

Initial.  
File: Four.

'Hello, this is the Baldtson Bio-Laboratory Reception Desk, how may I be of assistance?'

_'I would like to speak to the managing director, please.' _

'Well he's in his office working right now and we have instructions not to disturb him, I take all his calls and messages. Is this personal or business?'

_'Actually it's neither, but you can just patch me through, he'll be expecting me.'_

'I'm sorry but I can't patch through a call right now, and even if he were available I still can't without any prior identification, do you have an appointment?'

_'Ah... No I don't, but that's no problem. I told you, he knows who I am and he'll be expecting me.'_

'I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't do that without making an identity record beforehand, if you'll just give me your name then I can relay it to him.'

_'And _I'm_ afraid that I can't do that right now, but if you'll say I'm calling then I'm quite sure he'll be perfectly happy to answer.' _

'Like I said, I can still take a message, but if you want to speak to him directly you'll have to call back at a better hour, or—'

_'_Look_, I don't expect you to understand, but this is a very serious issue which demands his immediate attention, I'm quite certain he won't appreciate my message being held up.' _

'I'm... sorry but that doesn't change my position, all I'm asking is your name and if you can't provide that then this conversation is over.'

_'Oh, alright,_ alright. _Then... tell him it's the old friend he met at the bar in Vegas last night who goes by the name... Ridley.'_

'Okay, is that Ridley with two d's, or...Wait, is that even your real name?'

_'Hm. Well, they certainly hired you for your textbook performance, didn't they? It's a name, and it's the one I've given you. Whether or not it's real isn't your problem, now can you at least take a message for me?'_

'But... I'm really not allowed. I know this seems awfully finicky, but we have a very busy line right now, and—'

_'Yes, yes, I_ know, _it's company regulation, he's busy, you're taking all the calls, etcetera, but I'll give you the message anyway and trust me, it's in your best interests to relay it to him as soon as possible, do you understand?'_

'Well... yes, yes I understand.'

_'Good girl, I appreciate it. Then inform your boss that... well, tell him that the machine is still alive.' _

'...I beg your pardon?'

_'It's not important to you. Trust me; he'll understand what I mean. And also, inform him that when I say "alive", it may not be an entirely figurative term.'_

'I uh... I'm afraid I'm not sure what that means, but I'll certainly pass it on to him. Would you like to leave a contact number?'

_'No, that won't be necessary thank you. I'll get back to you in a couple of hours; he'll let you know to expect my call.'_

'Y-yes, of course. I'm... glad I could be of assistance. Have a nice d—'

**-Beep-**

'—ay... Hm. And I thought all that CB talk went out with the truckers.'

* * *

* * *

By the time Michael descended from the over-lit platform an hour later, the atmosphere of the laboratory had changed notably. A good deal of the chaos had died down and many people were even trailing off in search of food and coffee. Jessica Matthews however, stood poised at a nearby computer console looking for all the world as if she had never left and hadn't been sitting on the wall out back a couple of hours earlier, eating blueberry gum and staring into her coffee. Michael could've sworn there was an echo of Bonnie's training clearly visible in the way her fingers danced across the console, but perhaps it was his imagination. There was little if anything about Jessica that would have reminded him of Bonnie under usual circumstances.

The first glimmer of KITT's memory systems coming back online had been like a beacon. Less than a half hour ago the remains of the computer dashboard had started lightning up en mass –their screens cracked and broken, but the systems behind them either functioning on the most basic level again, or at least not getting any worse. Even Michael knew that lights appearing where there hadn't been any lights before couldn't be a bad thing.

But KITT still wasn't speaking.

Which figured, but was disturbing, nonetheless.

Jessica was gazing at one of the many large computer screens and smiling to herself, seemingly unaware that Michael was now staring over her left shoulder at the console. 'Bingo,' she muttered. 'You little pain, so _that's_ where you were hiding all this time, huh?'

'It surprises me that there's anywhere to hide at all, if you've got him on every fancy high-tech computer... thing in this building.'

Jessica didn't flinch when he spoke as he had expected her to, so maybe she had known he was there after all. She turned to face him, utterly composed. 'You say that like you don't know how they work.'

'Cybernetic technology really isn't my thing.'

'Oh, really? Says the man who rebuilt the _Knight Two Thousand's_ CPU from scrap and reconstructed it inside of a 67' chevy in the year 2000.' Jessica said, sweetly. 'Of course, that was before you removed it_ again_ and reconstructed it into the _Knight Four Thousand_'s shell, then calibrated the whole thing by yourself so the thing would actually function.'

Michael opened his mouth, thought about what he was going to say, changed his mind, closed it again, modified his wording and then finally responded. 'Riiight. In other words...?'

'In other words don't play dumb with me. Cybernetic technician you may not be, but you know your mechanics, Michael. I'd even go so far as to say that you actually understand a good forty percent of what's going on in these computers. The Foundation doesn't hire idiots.'

There was a moment of silence broken only by the not-so-subtle tapping of Jessica's pen against her clipboard. 'Oh-kay... so, you know all about me and I still know hardly anything about you. How exactly is this fair?'

Jessica kept smiling. 'I know what I read about you in your file, but that's not what I'm interested in right now anyway.' Jessica pressed some buttons and the computer monitor she was standing in front of blanked out momentarily, before switching to a pale, blue screen with the words "STAND BY" in red letters. 'I'm more concerned about our joint repair project. How's it's um... memory looking? Does KITT remember anything about what happened in the last mission?'

'Oh, he remembers everything,' Michael said. 'From last week backwards, that is. So far as I know, Jess, he has no more idea about what happened on that ridge than we do.'

'Ah.' Jessica's pen stopped tapping against the paper. 'Well, that's a problem, though to be honest I expected as much. We can't get anything out of his long storage memory files, either.' She waved a hand around the room. 'We've got all these computers working constantly to restore and repair as much as we can, but it's almost like we're just fixing blank leads. We repair a wire to a memory file, but there's never anything of importance in there. It's a dead blank for over eighty percent of his systems. I feel like we're chasing virtual ghosts. Or else it's blocking off its own memory files, even from itself.'

Michael paused, chewing over exactly what that was supposed to mean. 'So, wait, you think this is some kind of... self induced amnesia?'

'It's not impossible.'

'Trust me; I'm aware it's not impossible. If you've read the files then you already know all about that. It just seems unlikely that he'd do it voluntarily...' Or without having several thousand volts of live, electric cable falling on his hood. 'I mean, if his memory banks contain information which could help us find out what happened to Shawn, why would he hold back on it?'

'I never said it was doing it deliberately,' Jessica shrugged, leaning back against the console. 'If one of The KIFT's basic programs is driver preservation but also includes self preservation, then there's a chance that it could feel threatened by the knowledge contained in its memory banks... if that's the case it could have blocked them off for that reason.'

'You mean like a psychological block, right?'

'Well, I was thinking of it on more technical terms, but sure, your way works too. Either way I'm drawing a blank down here. Every time we think we're about to access a memory file that could contain useful information, it gets blocked off. Besides, we'd need the KIFT's consent to access the deepest memories fully and it's not really responding to us right now.'

Michael could believe that. 'No kidding. I've been talking to him for over an hour now and he's pretty much stopped speaking completely... He was asking me about Shawn.'

Jessica bit her bottom lip. 'Bigger problem, I suppose. Did you say what happened to her?'

'He knows she's dead,' Michael said, evenly. 'Why're you asking me, anyway? Can't you find out everything you want to by looking at one of those fancy screens?'

Jessica shook her head, wearing a wry smile and carefully placing her clipboard down on the edge of the computer panel. 'You've already made your point about that, Michael... along with about a third of this department. I admit that there's definitely more to this machine than just its technical and programmable capabilities. Are you happy with that?'

Michael feigned innocence as best he could. 'Perfectly.'

'Good. Now, since you're obviously wondering, this is where we're repairing some of its preliminary code-able functions,' Jessica changed subject, nodding towards the red message on the "STAND BY" computer. As Michael watched, she deactivated the "STAND BY" message and began typing something. White specks of coding appeared on the black surface of the monitor as she typed. Michael watched as thousands upon thousands of tiny computer folders materialised on screen, connected in intricate patterns which looked almost like he imaged the synapse would inside a human brain. Except that this surface was all based on microchips and memory-boards rather than flesh and blood. 'In other words, his memory-recall and stored files,' Jessica went on, without even breaking her typing speed. 'For example, there are still a few notable holes in many files, probably caused by damaged memory nodules and what may be those damned blocks the KIFT is setting up. Some of these files are so damaged that we won't be able to restore them at all, but there's still hope that we might be able to reclaim information concerning Shawn's most recent case, and if we can uncover that...'

'Then we might be able to find out what killed her,' Michael finished.

'Exactly... which I _would_ have already reported to our illustrious leader if we could actually find him... You didn't get a chance to talk to Maddock either, I suppose?'

Michael shrugged, still feeling irked about that. He found it hard to believe that Maddock would leave the grounds and vanish from the radar on the very same day that the FLAG main driver was killed and the Knight Four Thousand was utterly wrecked, bringing the entire project to a standstill, and yet that appeared to be exactly what had happened. 'He's not in his office and not in any of the facility buildings. I even pitched a _house call_, and I tried the police... You do know that this hasn't even been reported to them, yet, right?'

Jessica raised her eyebrows, looking as doubtful of this as Michael felt. 'I didn't, no... It wasn't my job to do so.' She suddenly seemed concerned. 'Should we be worried about this?'

'I'm... not sure. Last I checked Maddock was nothing if not thorough. You know of anywhere he might've gone? Anywhere we can get in contact with him?'

Jessica shrugged. 'With Maddock there's home and there's the office. Mostly the latter. If he's not in either of those places then I sure don't know where to find him. I'm his technician, not his secretary.'

'Yeah and would you believe she doesn't know where to find him, either?'

'I'm sure he's nearby,' Jessica said, nodding mostly to herself. 'I mean he wouldn't just vanish, not now, with what's happened. I thought he was due to make a statement to the whole department in a little while, and we're having a two minute silence in a few hours, too. There are a lot of people here who knew Shawn and want to know what happened to her.'

'Including you, right?'

'Yes,' Jessica sighed, adjusting her lab coat as if it were a heavy, uncomfortable weight on her shoulders. 'Including me. It's not that I had much time to get to know her before I joined FLAG... and I'm certainly not going to find time, now, but she was a colleague. You know,' Jessica went on, turning to look at him directly. 'Unlike you, Shawn McCormick actually existed on paper, and yet from what little I knew of her, it's almost like she _did_ die almost five years ago from a bullet to the head.'

'Yeah, it's becoming something of a tradition,' Michael said, doing something that he hadn't done in nearly fifteen years –glancing at his reflection in the black-and-white of the computer screen and not seeing his own face staring back.

'It's strange, don't you think?' Jessica murmured. 'She had no family to speak of... the friends she had betrayed her... There's no one to say goodbye to her except us. I guess you'd know all about that.'

She shook her head, as if that thought was a lot more confusing to her than it sounded to him. Then she seemed to straighten up. 'You'd better go... inform that CPU of yours that we'll be needing to perform the final diagnostic on the main system before we start really putting this body back together... We'll need that little black box, in other words. We can't put it off any longer, and maybe it'll give us some of the missing pieces of this puzzle it's gotten us all wrapped up in.' She sighed, as if realising this was going to put her a lot closer to the "sentient, talking automobile" than she would perhaps like to be. 'Any questions first?'

'Yeah, just one,' Michael said. 'Who –or what– killed Shawn McCormick?'

'Well, we're all asking that one, aren't we?' Jessica said, her voice softening slightly. She had turned away from the computer and stood, staring up into the glare of lights where the remains of KITT's body and CPU still waited in a silent suspension. 'And as of yet none of us have any answers. Whatever did this it was... well... very harsh.'

'Harsh isn't the word, Michael snorted, remembering skimming through the file before he'd entered the lab. 'Try brutal. Malicious. So far as I can tell someone out there ripped her apart, I mean there was hardly...' he halted, suddenly becoming conscious of his loud voice and the car behind them, presumably with his auditory processors still functioning. Michael finished his sentence in a whisper '...Hardly anything left to identify.'

'Definitely not an accident,' Jessica nodded, 'I might just be a techie, Michael, but I know a set up when I smell one, and this whole situation reeks of three day old bass, if you'll pardon the pun at your expense.'

'Then how did they get past KITT's driver-protecting defences?'

'Easy –by blowing the supposed "driver-protecting defences" to bits,' Jessica half snorted.' Not that that should have been "easy" at all. The Knight Industries Four Thousand is the engineering marvel of its time... The fastest, strongest, and most intelligent automobile ever created, and yet something in Mistletoe Valley just ripped it open like it was a tin can.' A visible shudder seemed to pass over her shoulder blades, which suddenly looked remarkably thin beneath an oversized lab coat. 'It's disturbing just to think about there being something so powerful out there. A missile, maybe. Or some kind of laser, or bomb... We won't be sure until we get the results back from the tests they ran before the repair job started.'

Michael thought about this for a second while looking at the flickering maze of network connections lightning up on the computer screen. 'He still has that protect-the-driver clause?'

'With a few modifications, yes, it's still there; though I haven't had any time to read up on it. We believe it... _he_ tried to activate it but whether he succeeded or not is a moot point; it wasn't enough to save Shawn.'

Or himself, Michael thought.

By now many of the technicians had apparently concluded their break and were filing back into the lab, bringing with them the smell of ground coffee which abruptly reminded Michael that he'd been sitting, cramped in one position with barely anything to eat or drink for going on fifteen hours. He'd been so worried about KITT, and so disturbed about Shawn's coroner's report, that he just hadn't thought about it. Somehow that sensation was annoyingly familiar.

'Mistletoe Valley…' Michael repeated the name with all the scepticism he had the first half a dozen times he said it. 'Sounds like something out of a nineteen-fifties picture book, doesn't it?'

'Maybe, but it doesn't look it,' Jessica said. 'The files say it was the site of some kind of laboratory. It used to be a natural area, but a lot of it was paved over to make room for the facility. It's also nowhere near the location of Shawn's supposed current mission.

You think maybe Shawn found out something they didn't want her to know?

'Perhaps, but that still doesn't explain the exact nature of her death.'

'We owe it to her to find that out then, don't we? And we owe it to KITT.'

It was only now that Michael noticed Jessica (who from the looks of it had some kind of immunity to the alluring smell of coffee) was giving him a curious look, similar to the one she had given him while sitting out back, chewing on her blueberry gum. It was the kind of look he must have had directed his way a hundred times or more in his life. A look which asked "Who are you, really? Why are you really involved in all this? What do you hope to accomplish?' Michael smiled vaguely, remembering that he had never been very good at answering those kind of questions, even when he'd thought he _had_ been sure of the answers.

'You really don't plan on playing the observer here, do you?' Jessica asked, inquisitively. 'I know that look. It's an old cop's look, isn't it? Or maybe an old Knight Industries Look. You want to be the one

'We all want to find them, Jessica... but yeah, I think this is the one time where I'm going to let something take precedence over the bass at the lake. I handed Shawn the name and job that killed her. I...' He swallowed the lump in his throat before he even realised it had formed. 'I didn't know her for all that long, but even if she was a pain in the ass, sometimes... I still cared about her. _KITT_ cared about her. You'd probably do well to remember that,' he added. 'Now, first I need to get to the airport and pick up an old friend with a mortal fear of aeroplanes. Then I'm going to track down Maddock, if he hasn't already shown up by then. Then I'll be back here before you know it...' he gestured in the direction of the podium. 'Keep KITT company for me until then, huh?'

Jessica's face twisted a bit, and Michael wasn't certain if the pain in her eyes was mock or genuine. 'Must I?'

'If you don't want him cold shouldering you every time you go under his hood then yeah, I'd advise it. He's not a very... ignorable personality and he doesn't deal well with rudeness.'

Jessica let out a breath in annoyance. 'I think that I'll be able to put up with that, somehow... and at this exact moment, Mister Knight, he doesn't even _have_ a hood.'

Michael smiled. 'There's that "Mister Knight" stuff again. I thought we'd agreed on Michael?'

'And _I_ thought we'd agreed on Jessica and on my not having to personify the technology of the _Knight Industries Four Thousand_.' Jessica said, primly, stiffening.

'The former I remember agreeing to, sure. The latter? Not so much, Jessie.'

'Do I have to repeat my laser scalpel threat?' Jessica snapped, but there was no real threat in her voice. No more so than the occasional biting remarks he used to exchange with Bonnie, or KITT, or Devon...

...And this was not the time to be thinking about that.

'Whether you believe it or not, Jessica,' he said, eventually. 'KITT's freaked out. He's scared... he's lost a driver and a friend. Adding the fact that he's a computer into the equation doesn't make things simpler for him, in fact I reckon it'll just make them more complicated. He doesn't have the coping techniques available that we have. If you're going to deal with him, then it stands to reason you need to take the bits you don't like with the bits you do and deal with it the best you can. That's how they always did it when I worked here. I really hope that hasn't changed too much.'

Jessica didn't look convinced, but she took his hand on her shoulder with good temper and Michael was fairly sure she watched him walking back to the still silent KITT's pedestal, then away through the labs and out of the corridor.

* * *


	7. File: Five

**

* * *

Finally some plot advancement… and Bonnie! Yay! And of course standard disclaimers and requests for concrit apply.

* * *

**

Initial.  
File: Five.

_Good evening listeners, you're programmed in to "California A" the hottest new music station of the twenty-first century and quite possibly the twenty second, too, if you want my opinion. This is Miles Hanway leading you in to the six-o-clock news and sports coverage. Our breaking news report, coming to us fresh from our sources at Washington states (no pun intnded, folks) that..._

A voice, a man pulling on another's sleeve as he worked beneath a large computer console, the way someone might work on a car.

'You heard what they said, right?'

A grunt. Impatient and not a little frustrated, emanating from beneath the console. 'What about this time?'

'About Shawn McCormick.'

A moment's pause while the man beneath the console searched for a precise mechanical tool lying beside him. Found it. Kept working.

_"There has been little word from the authorities to go on thus far but the president is due to make a formal statement concerning the new alliance at a conference later today, previously General Madison of the..."_

'Our driver? Of course I heard. And the car was nearly a write off too.' A sigh as the second man drew himself out from beneath the console for a moment. 'What a mess...' He paused, glanced at the object in the other man's hand before vanishing under the console again. 'And would you get that thing out of here? It's ancient and its's probably disrupting the circuitry.'

'No way, man, this radio is a classic antique and it still plays half decent tunes and picks upon the airwaves of six channels. I'm waiting on the results of the Bronx match here and they're down by thirty two...' A shuffle. 'Anyway I'm not talking about just _that_, c'mon, Tommy, it's obvious what _happened_, you're working on what happened right now.'

'I'm _trying_ to work on what happened, sure. As should you be rather than listening for football results on that outdated excuse for a sound system. This console has gone down and Miss Matthews wants it operational again before we get to fixing KITT's older storage banks...'

A laugh. '"Miss Matthews"? Man, she's been here twenty four hours and she's already got you wrapped around her little finger.'

'Chris, are you going to help me, or just stand around hankering after gossip? Wait, no, don't answer that question.'

'To heck with work. We've been working non-stop for the last eighteen hours, I'm waiting on the results for the greatest sporting match of the decade and my back's about to give out on me like I'm some eighty year old man. You know, he's not gonna up and die on us if you stop for a couple of minutes. We're fixing a car, not performing brain surgery.'

This comment was answered by an annoyed muttering. 'What was that?'

'I said that's what _you_ think. I wouldn't expect a basic techie like you to even begin to understand the complex software and hardware that go into constructing this machine, Chris, and I don't expect you to understand that he's not all gear boxes and exhaust pipes. The systems are in a very precarious state right now. The sooner we move it out of "critical" the sooner we can all go grab coffee.'

The first of the two half snorted, half laughed in agreement. 'Yeah, I hear that. So anyway, what've you heard?

A groan. 'Heard about _what_?'

'You know... about what it was like when they...' he paused, scuffling back and forth. '...Found her.'

'That's not something you need to be interested in,' the voice of the man beneath the console turned cold and scathing. 'Honestly, you'd think it was a tabloid news report the way you're going on about it.'

'Hah. Yeah and the next thing I hear the Knight Industries Four Thousand will have been blown up by space aliens from the moons of Jupiter. You need to lighten up a bit, Tommy.'

'No, I don't. Maybe _you_ need to tighten up. And get back to the department where you're needed, for that matter. Wandering around, looking for gossip about the when's and why's and how she died. Just look at the car over there, Chris. Take one good long look at it, and then think about what must've happened to the person who was _inside_ it.'

'Ahah – so she _was_ driving the car at the time.'

'Chris—'

'Too late, I get it.'

'...Why are you being so damned intrusive about all of this?'

'Intrusive? It's innocent curiosity.'

'About a very morbid subject,' he put down the first tool and searched around for a second. Mister Miles would be ashamed of you.'

'Well Mister Miles isn't here anymore and neither is she, so they're not exactly going to complain.'

A clatter. The tool had been dropped. 'You just walk away right now and get back to your department, Christopher, and I'll pretend I never heard that.'

'Okay, _okay_, sorry. Sheesh, I didn't mean it like that.'

'No, you never do. Christ, Askew, haven't you ever heard the saying "do not speak ill of the dead"?'

'I think so. That falls into the same category as "cast not pearls before swine" and uh... "Cocky technicians should be seen and not heard", right?'

'Yes, all of which I've said to you at least once since you started working here.'

_'...In further news, the pilot of the _Louisiana Cellracer_ and three times conqueror of the official land-speed record, Dennis Row, was killed on Monday in a failed practise run...'_

'Hey, hang on a sec...'

'Christopher—'

'Shhh, man, listen!'

_'...Personal training ground. Row had been preparing for an attempt to break the record of five hundred and fifty in the specially equipped vehicle when he was involved in what experts are calling a freak accident involving a blown engine turbin at over four hundred miles per hour. His funeral will be a family affair only with a service held for...'_

'Hear that, Tommy? Five hundred and fifty mph. You know, I figure that's more than twice the max speed of that baby over there.'

A snort. 'Yeah, back in the eighties, maybe. And anyway, look what happened to _that_ guy...'

'Well aren't we the hypocrite? That guy was a legend when I was a kid, Tom, just like that car over there was when you were. Now who needs to show respect for the dead?'

'Chris, for god's sakes—'

'Tom? Chris?' A woman, reappeared from around another nearby console, her eyes looking as if she hadn't torn them away from the screen in several hours. 'For god's sakes, what are you fighting about now?'

'Nothing, Claire, nothing. Chris here was just getting back to his department, where he belongs...'

'Actually, Claire we were discussing the current land speed record and various related and unrelated deaths which Tommy boy here seems to think I have no sympathy for. Who has no sympathy? I care, that's why I wanna know in the first place. I mean maybe if Dennis Row had had a molecular bonded shell on the _Cellracer_... Though apparently someone's certainly got one up on that little design plus... The thing's a mess, isn't it?'

'Oh, he's finally catching on. We have a lot to deal with here, Askew. Claire, something just ripped the hell out of the KIFT and he's standing here looking for gossip about a dead woman.'

'Hey, hey, I wouldn't put it just like _that_. Claire, he's exaggerating.'

Claire paused, sighed. 'You two will be the death of me, you know that?'

'Maybe so, what I wanna know is what was the death of _her_?'

Tom could've chosen to get worked up about this particular choice of wording, but eighteen hours or work weren't helping his wit. 'Who knows; I certainly don't, but somehow I doubt she just went too fast.'

'Or not fast enough.'

'It's all conspiracies with you, boy. When you're older...'

'Yeah, yeah, when I'm as old as you I'll have a better sense of understanding about the ways of the world and reality and yadda yadda, yadda, but there's one thing you're forgetting, Tommy.'

'Oh really, what's that?'

'That this is Knight Industries. And that wreck up there is the supposedly in-dee-structibul _Knight Industries Four Thousand_... Anything can happen, man. Anything can happen...'

'...'

'So, what was all that about?'

Nothing, just Chris Askew from Basic Tech being his usual, insensitive self.'

'Don't mind him, he's harmless enough. I figure he was a journalist in his past life.'

'And a radio salesman in the one before that.'

'Heh. Sure, if you say so. Come on, I need some help with some microchip couplings over here... Oh, look, Chris left his radio behind.'

'Ha. Typical, even when you get rid of the kid, a bit of him hangs around...'

_And in a lighter report, the Captain of the California State Police announced today that...'

* * *

_

Airports.

Sheesh.

Michael had never had problems with flying. The only issue he had with these places was the crowds. There must have been several thousand people making the massive white buildings with their thousands of signs and posts in different languages churn with movement. California International was living up to its reputation as a modern hub of global transport.

The system had previously been criticised as one of the worst culprits for accelerating the greenhouse effect, but since the introduction of algae-based non-polluting fuels in the mid nineties, flying had quickly become one of the most promoted forms of interstate travel in America. Some things, however, didn't change. Airports were still places of chaos, screeching audio transmissions and people who always seemed to be in a rush to get to someplace else, now there were just a lot more of them than there had been twenty years ago.

And they were still just the kind of place where things could (and often did) go wrong. They were a place of hijackers, police restraints, metal detectors that picked up on belt buckles and let the illegal handguns go through and bad experiences with missing luggage. The latter two happened if you were lucky, the former two happened if you were extremely _un_lucky, or your name was Michael Knight. This was exactly why he'd attempted to avoid the places wherever possible for pretty much his entire life. (Or lives, depending on how you looked at it.)

In truth, it wasn't as if Michael had been expecting an entirely pleasant reunion in the first place, the location of their meeting notwithstanding.

How long since they'd seen each other? Three years at least, and their only interaction then had been a few, brief minutes at Devon's funeral. No one had been in an especially talkative mood.

Bonnie.

Michael waited a few seconds before going to greet her at the entrance to gate twenty-six, drinking her in like a portrait as she stood checking her shoulder bag amongst a throng of other passengers. There were spurts of grey forming in her hair which hadn't been there years ago and made him reach a hand self consciously to his own head. A few wrinkles creasing the edges of her eyes and neck, which were probably less to do with age and more to do with the education system. He had a feeling they wouldn't be waiting around for anymore luggage. She'd probably raced to get here as fast as he had.

Eventually he had to approach her, slowly, as one might approach a nervous deer, and tap her on the shoulder from behind.

'Professor Barstow, I presume.'

Michael meant to say this louder than he did. Somehow he ended up whispering, and she still jumped half out of her skin. Then she turned to look at him, eyes firm and wide.

The first thing he had honestly expected was a whack about the face, but he shouldn't have worried. Hugging her came as instinctively as lifting the commlink to his mouth ever had. And it felt just the same as it ever did too, except for that his joints and ancient injuries creaked more than they had fifteen years ago.

Nobody gave them a second glance, not even after they had been standing there for a good three minutes. Probably because this was also the kind of thing that happened in airports all the time. Nobody but them could see the tension hiding in the other's shoulders. Nobody but they were aware that hugging was just another way of postponing the inevitable stream of questions and accusations. For now, neither of them had to think about anything like that. Neither of them had to care about what the other had to apologise for.

Eventually, Bonnie broke the quiet and spoke, without bothering to lift her head. 'You're late.'

Michael blinked. 'I never said I was coming.'

'But I knew you would, and you did. Late.'

Michael chuckled in spite of himself. 'Who am I to argue with a graduate professor? You okay?'

'Mm. Most of me, I think. I left at least a little of myself behind during the take off. Or maybe the guy I was sat next to talked it out of me.' She pulled back a little, but not entirely. She seemed reluctant to let go. Michael remembered feeling that tightness in her grip before. It was one of her "I'm glad you're okay, I really am, but Christ, I am going to kill you for whatever you've done now" type hugs.

And then she seemed to glance at something to their left and flinched, burying back into him with a suddenness that nearly forced him off his feet. 'Oh no...'

'What? What is it?'

'Just keep hugging,' Bonnie muttered, muffling her face in his shirt for good measure. This confused the hell out of him until he realised they were being watched. By a man in a beige lined suit and matching tie striding towards them briskly through the crowds.

Michael's first reaction was to tense up in a defensive mode, maybe even curl around her like a shield. Then he realised that this tall, balding, slightly pudgy man looked about as threatening as a sack of potatoes in pinstripe, and stopped.

'Hey there, miss! Miss Barstow!'

'Ah... friend of yours?' Michael asked. Bonnie reluctantly removed herself from his shirt and turned around to face the man, muttering around the kind of smile someone gives when they're really suppressing physical pain.

'Something like that. Hello there, Giff. I thought you were still waiting for your luggage.'

By this point, "Giff" was right in front of them, trying to get a decent grip on a briefcase with one hand. 'Nah, there ain't much to speak of. Guess you're off now too, huh?'

'I... yes,I guess I am, thanks for... you know, it really wasn't as bad a trip as it could've been.'

'That so? See, I toldja the flight would be over soon as ya got on board. And we didn't even need the lifejackets, huh?' He was talking to Bonnie, but looking at Michael the same way a second-hand car salesman might look over a prospective buy-and-sell machine. 'This the uh... you know?'

The "you know" gave Bonnie a questioning look and Bonnie, for her part, seemed to put a distinctive effort into not turning red as a beet. 'Well... sort of.'

'Oh don't tell me, let me guess: it's complicated?' Giff sniggered and looked back at Michael. 'You gotta hang onto this one, seriously, she's a card. Smart, too. Professor of whatjimacallit at the fancy Harvard Place, so a lot of things seem to be complicated.'

'Ah, yeah,' Michael shifted uncertainly. 'Yeah I know that, and I will. Um. Nice to meet you?'

Giff took his hand without asking and his handshake was more of a tight squeeze than anything else. Michael almost wondered for a moment if he was getting out of shape because _damn_, this guy had a grip. And he was still looking at Michael as if he were some kind of spectacle, too.

'Yeah,' Giff shrugged eventually, seeming to have reached a personal conclusion. 'I guess you're not too little for a lady to cross a state line for.' He leaned a little closer to Bonnie and whispered, but clearly not quietly enough for Michael not to hear. 'Just so you know, though, he's had some seeerious work done. I can see it a mile off. We car salesmen, you know, we've got eyes for this kinda thing.'

Giff winked, and Bonnie visibly suppressed a smile as Giff patted her on the shoulder a lot more gently than he had squeezed Michael's hand. 'Well I'll be seeing you around, sweetie. You look after that kid of yours, ya hear? Just remember what old McIntyre said about kids' bein' made of rubber. They always bounce right back when ya chuck them at stuff.'

'I will keep that in mind, Gifford,' Bonnie coughed visibly, and Michael got the feeling she'd been saying stuff like this for the last four hours. 'I'll um... yes, I will. I'll see you around.'

'Sure thing. Though maybe you folks need a cab, can I get you a cab? Seriously, I'm heading hotel-way myself.'

'Ah, that won't be necessary, but thanks anyway,' Bonnie said quickly, before Michael could get off a word. 'Not that we don't appreciate the offer, but I think we're just going to go home together now and deal with things.'

Giff shrugged again. 'No problem, sugar, I could tell you needed boosting, just make sure Mr Work Done here looks after ya, is all I'm saying.' And the Giff made his exit, stage left, vanishing amongst the crowded throng of the airport masses.

Bonnie's efforts at not sniggering broke down then and there, while Michael was rendered speechless for the second time in twenty four hours. At least this time, however, it was out of sheer amusement rather than the abject horror he'd felt at seeing the remains of KITT's body.

'Uh, Bonnie, who was that guy?'

Bonnie laughed again. 'I think that was a concerned fellow passenger. Odd guy, but he meant well. He even loaned me a paper bag when he thought I was going to hyperventilate.'

'Wow. Yeah, that's... that's a real generous fellow. Like Danny Divito while in character, only taller.'

'Oh, Michael, what on earth do _you_ know about Danny DeVito?'

'I know that he's _that_ guy when he's not on set of his latest blockbuster.'

Bonnie smiled at him, the tension draining out of her hold on his arm before being replaced by pressure of a different type. 'How's KITT?'

'Well,' Michael paused, wondering whether another hug right now might distract her, or at least make her feel more prepared for what he knew he'd have to say, but eventually he opted against it. Instead he moved an arm around her back and steered them slowly towards the exit doors. '...We're glad you're here, Bonnie. There are still some guys in the tech department from your day, you know? Bob's still there... and Claire, do you remember Claire?'

'Of course I do. She was a service checker back when I was here, but this is either an attempt at avoiding my question, Michael, or an answer that's more worrying than the one I was hoping for. Did you keep talking to him? Asking the questions I told you? Did you—'

'I did everything you said, Bon. Textbook. And... it worked, for so long, but... I guess the more his memory banks came back online, the more he had to face some stuff he didn't want to... things went a little screwy again after that.' His hand squeezed hers around his waist. 'I think he needs you.'

'But I don't understand, why would his systems shut down again?' Bonnie looked genuinely confused. 'Did they check for viruses? Accidental default obstructions? Sometimes if someone activates his safe modes, then--'

'Yeah I'm sure they did, but I don't think it's anything like that. Bonnie they...' He sighed, watching her expectant face. 'They think he's doing it himself. Blocking out their signals. And his memory banks too.'

'But why?'

'We're not sure. But there are a lot of reasons. Look, I didn't mention this before but do you remember my replacement Shawn McCormick? The one with the memory chip from KITT's systems in her head?'

'Yes I saw her for a while at the funeral she...' Bonnie paused, biting down on her lip as realisation dawned. 'Oh, no.'

'They found her body near what was left of KITT,' Michael said softly. He knew that Bonnie and Shawn had hardly known each other, but somehow it felt necessary to be careful. The death of Shawn McCormick had destroyed a little bit of KITT, too. 'There wasn't... much left to identify, but they're sure it's her. They think he tried to protect her but they can't even be sure if she was in the car at the time, and either way...'

He trailed off into silence, allowing her to drink this in. The hustle and bustle of the airport seemed to fade into the background.

'We should go right there.' Bonnie said after a minute or so had passed. 'Can you drive me?'

'Well, yeah, but, I think you should probably take it a little slower for a few minutes. Come get a coffee and something to eat. I mean if what I hear about airplane food is true...'

'It is, believe me it is. But I can eat later; I want to go to FLAG.'

'Bonnie...' Michael paused, trying to think how to phrase it. She had always been a stickler when it came to KITT's hardware, he should've known that wouldn't have changed one jot in the fifteen years since she'd really worked with him. 'A few minutes won't hurt; in fact it'll probably help you.'

'You're the one that said he needs me, Michael,' Bonnie said evenly, with a shrug that couldn't be genuinely casual. 'I need to get there, check out the damage, review the reports and find out what the hell happened. And they could've been a lot more damn specific about that when they called me in the first place. It took me over ten minutes just to convince them to talk to you.' She looked annoyed, and perhaps a little hurt, at being so shoved through the legal processes of what, in fact, had once been _her_ laboratory. 'The only way I'll feel less cut off about all this is if I get to him.'

'Hey he's in good hands. Well over thirty odd pairs of them, from what I saw back at that lab,' he held up a mobile phone. 'If there's a problem again or he starts talking then they've promised to let me know right away.'

'Michael—' Bonnie started, but Michael silenced whatever she had been about to say with a tap of her hand.

'Look, you just got away from your worst fear and you need to sit down so we can talk these through, Michael said, feeling slightly self conscious. Playing some kind of guiding adult, like Bonnie was a child in need of comfort wasn't exactly their usual M.O. but neither of them cared much right now. Michael had already decided that being brave now was no more fun now than it had been back in the old days.

Bonnie's hold tightened slightly behind his back, her shoulders seizing. They were still walking back through the airport, like one slow tumbleweed in the middle of a very disorganized stampede. 'My worst fear is back at FLAG, Michael, not here in some crummy airport.'

'Hey, now, Professor Barstow, I don't like airports anymore than you but they _are_ the best form of commercial travel there is, let's not blaspheme our blessings.'

Michael feigned amazement at the twitch that passed over Bonnie's face in response to that statement, while at the same time feeling a more _genuine_ surprise that talking to her could be so easy. Almost as easy as it had been fifteen years ago. What exactly had changed in all that time? 'Hey, was that a smile.'

'No, it was a scowl possessing Michael Knight convincing properties. Is it working?'

'Fibber. That was so very much a smile. Unless of course, you'd rather take a cab with Gifford back there.'

Another twitch, this one blatantly impossible to hide. 'Just fifteen minutes,' Michael repeated. 'It's all of your time I'll take from him.'

'Idiot,' Bonnie gave him a shove in the side. 'You were always stealing more of my valuable KITT-repairing time than that. I should've had you fired for it. I could do that, you know.'

'Oh, I'm sure you could. But don't play it that way with me, Professor, you know I'd never think of separating the two of you.'

'No, but then, you didn't have to, did you?' Bonnie murmured. 'We accomplished that task by ourselves, all three of us of our own free will.' Michael felt a shiver of discomfort at the thought of an understanding neither of them were ready to accept at this point. Of course, the reality was that in fifteen years, the entire _world_ could change.

'Come on, Bonnie. Just a quick sandwich? I'll... explain everything I know, so you know what we're getting into. And they do a mean chicken roll in that little cafe-place over there. Okay?'

A pause. They had stopped by now, right in the middle of the crowded airport, with trolleys and figures bustling past on either side of them.

'...Okay.' Bonnie sighed, grudgingly. 'Ten minutes.'

'Hey, I said _fifteen_.'

'Okay then, nine minutes.'

'Fourteen.'

'Eight.'

'Thirteen.'

'Five.'

'Twelve.'

'Quit while you're ahead, Mister Knight.'

Michael mocked indignance, only now realising that they were somehow face to face again and that Bonnie's eyes, for all their creases and time worn edges, had never lost even a glimmer of their fire. 'Okay okay, you win. Ten minutes it is.'

'Good.'

And then she took his arm and set them walking again, with almost but not quite the same composure as she'd had a moment earlier. In control again.

Michael smiled. 'I'm glad we got that agree upon. Now the question is, professor, do I get any extra credit for paying?'

'...You're still a dope, you know that?'

'Bonnie, I can only wish that were as true as you make it sound.' Michael smiled as they headed towards the nearest cafe while wondering if there was some way he could secretly extend their time to twenty minutes without her knowing. She needed longer than this, he knew. To be honest maybe both of them did. Time to think and reacquaint themselves with each other's existence... He opened the door of the small, crowded cafe as they approached, and held it open so she could enter before him.

And that was the moment when Michael heard somebody scream, from a distance he knew from experience was likely too far away for him to get to them in time. Bonnie's grip loosened on his arm in surprise, but Michael pulled her back and, then, as if on some kind of instinct, dragged the both of them to the ground.

And almost the exact moment he did so, the wall roughly eighty feet away from them, constructed out of no less than eighteen inches of solid, reinforced concrete, seemed to explode and rip open so much torn, white paper.

* * *


	8. File: Six

**This chapter was murder to write, mostly because i suck at high tension, dramatic events such as huge things crashing through airport walls. I also suck at phone conversations, so a rather sucky chapter in all, but necessary for plot continuation.  
**

* * *

Initial.  
File: Six.

'Hello, this is phone number 122 9463 speaking.'

_'So you're there, are you? Good. It's about time.' _

'Well hello to you, too.'

_'Don't give me that. You do exactly what I asked you _not _to do and call up my office right in the _middle of the day, _leave me some... some cryptic message and say you'll call back. Then you don't call back and I'm forced to hunt you out myself!'_

'...Oh dear.'

_'Damn straight! Do you realise I'm stood at a payphone three miles away from my office because of you? How am I going to explain being home an hour and a half late to my wife? You know fine well I'm not allowed to contact you from any landline which could connect you to us. I don't enjoy being messed about like this._

'Easy, sir, it really isn't my fault. You could've warned me that you had such a thorough system for placing calls to your office, you know. Otherwise I would've exhibited more precaution. Though maybe you'll be happy to know that your idiot of a secretary does a very textbook job.'

_'Oh, really? Well that's more than I can say for you. Honestly, "the machine is still alive"? What kind of a ridiculous coded message do you call that?'_

'...A suitably descriptive one?'

_'A little __too_ damn descriptive. You're lucky she didn't think we were covering up a murder or something.'

'Are you entirely certain we're not?'

_'Oh, very funny.'_

'It wasn't a joke, sir. You understand our circumstances right now, and as far as human morality goes, we're not exactly falling on the white side of the line.'

_'Screw morality. Right now, we have bigger fish to fry than just these simple human concepts and theories about good and bad and you know that. Anyway, what happened to those people wasn't our fault.'_

'Not directly, no, but we _did_ arrange for them to be out there in the first place. Using somewhat underhanded methods.'

_'We arranged for the second one, sure, but not the first. That was a fluke. A mishap with absolutely nothing to do with our agenda... frankly I have no damn clue just how it happened in the first place... it should've been impossible.'_

'I'm aware... I wouldn't worry about us being linked to the incident with the racer, though. There was no evidence left behind at the "crash" site. Seems they're putting it down to some kind of a technical glitch or server error. They have no idea what happened, not do they honestly seem to care.'

_'Good. Let's try and keep it that way for a while longer. You mustn't start to think that way, you know. If we start beating each other over the head with morality then we're never going to get anywhere.'_

'Not much chance of that, sir. Like I told you: the machine is still alive.'

_'...So you did mean what I thought you meant with that.'_

'No offence, sir, but what _else_ could I have possibly meant? Amazing, isn't it? Of course, all of this is theoretical, assuming that t really is, as you said, "alive" at all, but if it is...'

_'You still doubt it?'_

'You know I'm not easily convinced of these things. However right now, I can't think of any other explanations for it's... it's survival than conscious will. Spurces say the woman is dead, obviously. _She_ didn't have a molecular bonded shell.'

_'No surprise there... looks like you were right, They dealt with the problem in entirely the wrong way.'_

'It would appear so.'

_'So then... explain to me, will you please: is this a good situation or a bad situation we have here'_

'It's hard to say; at this point... its survival is certainly interesting. As for exactly how much of it has survived, and what it can recall of what happened... I'm not sure of that yet. But if the vehicle is functioning, sir... if it _knows_... if it _remembers_ what happened to it...'

_'It won't remember... There's no way... No way in heaven or hell it could remember. And with its driver dead...'_

'...Then there's no pilot. And it's worth about as much to us as Ockham's Razor is right now. I know that already, sir, but thanks for reminding me.'

_'You're trying my patience. For goodness sakes, this is not the time for your ironic tongue. You know what this could do to us. You know what will happen if things don't work out accordingly. This could be decades of work down the pan, and who knows what'll happen to us. "Breaches of Naional Security" will be the least thing we have to worry about.'_

'Then what would you suggest?'

_'...I say there's nothing else for it. We'll have to terminate.'_

'But it could take years for another suitable subject to come along, maybe even decades...'

_'Or it might never happen at all. I know that. But right now, I'm thinking "que sera, sera". Better to not take the risk at all than to do a half-assed job of it. It's junk. To be honest I'm surprised it even made it this far.'_

'No, sir but if it's still alive now... and that's assuming, of course, that it actually is alive, well...'

_'So what? Dying animals will kick and whine for a lot longer than they should out of desperation.'_

'I'm not sure that "dying animal" is the right definition for where this machine is concerned, sir.'

_'...What does that mean?'_

'Well, what it means is that... it's not exactly on its last legs right now; so to speak... it's balanced in a rather precarious position, certainly, but it doesn't look like it's going to cease functioning at any given moment. It even...'

_'It what?'_

'Well, it... might be getting better.'

'...'

'I... did mention that it has a self repair component too, didn't I? And they're working very hard with it to get it functioning again. Nothing we can do about human perseverance, eh sir?'

_'Mm. No. You can't sabotage, I suppose?'_

'Sir, you know I can't –and won't– do something like that,. It's not the way we operate.'

'I thought you'd say that.'

'I say it because it's our truth. You wouldn't want us to go against our fundamental truth now, would you?'

_'Hm. You know, we have a little thing called "Stockholm Syndrome". With a little adjusting it could very well be applied to...'_

'Sir, call this insubordination if you must... but there is no way in hell I'm going to let you finish that sentence. No. Just no.'

_'Heh. I thought as much. Alright. Keep watching for now, don't interfere and contact me in forty eight hours with whatever information you've obtained.'_

'Very well. And one more question, sir...'

_'Yes?'_

'Do you like Chinese food? It's just that I'd rather meet face to face for once.'

_'...Make it a deal that you'll never speak to my secretary again and I'll be happy to oblige.'_

* * *

The first thing Michael was aware of was the screaming. Lots of screaming all around him, from about a hundred different people.

It had been a long time since he'd heard anyone making a sound like that. You didn't hear much screaming up at the lake. It was almost the same sensation as he'd had meeting Bonnie again a few minutes ago. He'd thought he would never forget what it was like, and yet somehow, what he was hearing now was totally different to what he would've expected. It was loud and violent in his ears, and echoed across the cavernous expanse of the airport building all around them. He had forgotten what screaming sounded like and now he was being suddenly and painfully reminded.

The second thing he heard was a strange, whirring sound. Rather like the resonance of KITT's engine, powering down after a two hour drive. This was accompanied by a wild sputtering noise and the sound of creaking timbers and cracking concrete.

Michael carefully opened his eyes, expecting to see chaos. He wasn't disappointed.

It took a few seconds for him to reacquaint himself with all five senses. His vision gradually cleared, his head finally stopped ringing and he became away of the several tons of concrete which had apparently shoved him several metres across the floor.

The small cafe which they had just been entering when it happened (whatever "it" was) had caved in on its side, like a child's sand castle. A street outside could be clearly visible through the massive hole in the wall, and the ground all around him was littered with shattered fragments of glass which were, presumably, all over him, too.

'Bonnie?' just like their first meeting at the gateway, Michael's voice came out a lot quieter than he had intended it to. He sat up carefully so as not to impale himself on the shards. No serious cuts, he realised, and nothing felt broken... He tried not to panic, but that was easier said than done. 'Bon? Bonnie, you alright? Bonnie!'

'...Here.'

Michel looked round and found who he was looking for, sitting inside of the metal frame of what had once been the glass filled cafe doorway. She was doing the same thing as he had –sitting up very slowly and carefully, so as not to cut herself on the glass. She seemed to have bitten her own lip after the tremor started and there was a small stream of blood running down the corner of her mouth. Her face was also the same colour as the whitewashed walls of the airport, but asides from being unbelievably shaky, she looked in one piece. 'I'm alright...'

'Like hell you're alright,' Michael staggered to her, half on his knees and took hold of both her arms in his. She was shaking in a way he hadn't seen her shake since that time they'd had to drag KITT's remains out of an acid pit.

'Yeah well I'm... better than whatever just ripped a chunk out of that wall, Michael, please, I've gotten through worse than a lousy quake.' Bonnie muttered, but she still clung to his arms just a little tighter than was really necessary. She was standing up before he could stop her –shakily, but with no signs of falling over again once she was upright, not even after he had let go of her arms, and realised he was now standing upright too.

'I don't think that was a quake, Bonnie...'

'Well, whatever it was, it didn't kill us,' Bonnie swallowed. 'That's always a good thing.'

Michael looked around. Crowds of people had scattered from around the broken wall, and the gaping hole appeared to have shifted the entire foundation of the airport like a rictor scale six earthquake. The ground was forced upwards and what remained of the roof was crumbled in, creating a mess of concrete the height of a three story building. And in amongst the rubble lay... something... a strange, burned out black lump of what was probably metal, barrel shaped and smouldering.

Michael glanced at the positioning of the cafe door in comparison to the broken wall. Calculated where they had been. God, if he and Bonnie had gone in the other direction... if they had been just a few feet to the left, or a few seconds faster.

Michal let out a sigh, then he realised that sighing hurt and clutched a hand to his chest. It was an old habit he never really got out of after leaving FLAG, or for that matter, Vietnam: If your chest hurt check your ribs, because one or more of them was probably broken.

Michael let out another breath very slowly, thanking god that none of his bones shifted in ways they shouldn't. Most of the screaming, he now realised, was coming from inside of the cafe, from the people who had presumably been trapped by the crumbling wall. He had to fight back the instinct to push his way in there through the fallen rock. He'd probably just bring the rest of the wall down on them if he tried.

'Michael,' Bonnie swallowed, seeming to regain a little of herself. 'What... what is that?'

He did have some glass cuts, Michael realised now, welling up and soaking through his white t-shirt. Bonnie's jumper was made of thicker stuff though, and had stopped a lot of the broken shards from penetrating. None of it seemed to hurt at all.

'I don't know, but I'll find out. Stay here, wait for security.'

'But, Michael there are people in there...' Bonnie protested, glancing desperately at the remains of the cafe.

'But we can't get in there until we know it's safe, and there's someone over here, too,' Michael interrupted, staring into the wreckage of the wall; at the strange, humming black shape inside of it. He glanced back at her. Face still white, lip still bleeding, eyes still wide with alarm and brow furrowed with a desperate attempt at composure. 'Are you okay? Bonnie?'

'Y-yeah,' Bonnie swallowed. 'I'm fine, I just... I never thought my life would be saved agreeing to go for a sandwich.'

At any other time Michael would've laughed. Later on, maybe he even would. Right now however, he just squeezed Bonnie's hand.

The air tasted of electricity, as if whatever it was in the debris had cracked through a few pylons before getting here. Michael realised that this was likely exactly what had happened. He let go of Bonnie's hand, blocked the screaming from his ears and stumbled across the mountain of rubble. Beyond that rubble, through the torn concrete, he could see a scorched expanse of ground, peppered with smoke. The object had travelled in a direct straight line, across several fields, roads and parking lots, (smashing through several cars in the process and leaving them burned and smoking) before colliding with the building.

Michael had to wince through acrid black smoke to get a half decent look at whatever it was that had done the colliding. Stone trembled beneath his feet as the thing's engine died a screeching death. Only after about two minutes of swiping at the smoke with both cut hands did he manage to find the cockpit.

And it _was_ a cockpit. Michael was sure of that. A machine with a cockpit and the ability to plough through walls, and it had a driver. Michael found him, now, hunched up inside of the small, scorched, like a too-young chick sitting curled within a black eggshell.

_Small craft_, Michael realised. Too small. Too light. It was so badly seared that it was difficult to identify, but if he had to guess, Michael would have said that this was a medium size glider at the most. The type that came with small, high powered, eco-propulsion systems and which couldn't travel faster than one hundred miles per hour in mild-to-calm weather conditions. The only people who used these things were those trying to set Round-the-World-by-Air records or people flying the banners at air shows.

No way could this machine have crashed through a wall like that under its own power. No way in a million years.

'Hey,' Michael started to say, and then stopped, choking on the smoke and the disturbingly familiar smell of burning skin. _No smoke without fire_, he thought, and yet here there were no flames here, just smoke and heat. He had to draw his shirt over his mouth so he could talk without gagging. His cuts hadn't hurt before but now, exposed to the smoke, they seemed to sear just like the metal of the machine. 'Hey, are you alright? Help's coming, don't worry, just hang on and talk to me, alright?'

There was a faint sound from the figure. Maybe a moan or an attempt at speech. Whatever it was intended to be, it came out garbled with pain and blood.

'Hey, can... can you tell where I am? Can you look at me?'

Michael glanced back through the smoke. He could just see Bonnie, back on her knees again, one hand stretched gingerly through the wreckage of the cafe, as if trying to reach one of the people trapped in there. The sounds of screaming had died down into incoherent panic and he could see security guards and wardens racing towards the smashed building.

'My name's Michael, can... can you tell me your name. I need to know...' He swallowed hard, smoke fumes scratching at his throat, the metal of the glider burning hot whenever he brushed against it. 'What happened here? Can you tell me that? _Look_ at me.'

He reached out a hand to the man's seized up shoulder, blistering under the charred remains of what must have been some kind of jacket. Most of the man's clothing had been burned away.

And then he raised his face and looked at Michael, who flinched before he could stop himself.

For a moment, Michael was reminded of a glanced-over line he had seen when the forensic scientists at FLAG let him glimpse Shawn's coroner's report. _"Shows evidence of deep, diagonal cuts around face, neck and chest area, along with considerable burning. Lacerations are not compatible with any commonly used weapons. Possible explanation: shrapnel torn from the damaged vehicle? Unknown weaponry?"_

That had been all they allowed Michael to see, and even that had mostly been because the forensic scientist on duty that morning had been around since Michael's days at FLAG and had been willing to bend the rules a little. Michael had been stuck with the thought of Shawn's dead face trapped in his mind, and yet now, all of a sudden, he felt he didn't need to imagine what her dead body would look like anymore. He knew it would look just like this man's blackened and bleeding face, eyes blood shot...

Michael blinked hard, partly in alarm and partly to wade off the smoke still making his eyes water. It really was like looking into the eyes of a dead man. Or maybe just the face of a man soon to be dead. Fingers clutched the charred remains of what Michael figured had probably been a steering joystick. There was blood on his hands, probably from his burned-off fingernails and his teeth were grit tightly together in terror and pain.

'...Urts.'

This time Michael knew for certain that he was trying to talk.

'I know. I know, I... easy there, don't move. Stay right where you are, or you'll make the bleeding—'

'...Kni...ght.'

Michael hesitated, mouth still open in mid warning. The pilot glanced at him, and then twisted his head away, slowly uncurling his hands from the joystick's remains and looking down at his bleeding fingers. The voice was harsh and ragged, and sounded as if it were trying to force its way up from underwater. And it was broken up, too, just like KITT's voice, back at FLAG. There was a questioning edge to the pilot's tone, similar to the one Bonnie had used on him less than half an hour ago. As if he thought he knew who he was looking at, but wasn't certain. 'Knight...' he said again, hissing the word through his tightly clenched teeth.

'That's me,' Michael finally closed his mouth, after getting a taste of the smoke on his tongue. 'I... That's me. How do you know...?'

The driver uttered another small cry of pain which dissolved into a low, frightened chuckle. He lifted a hand to the one Michael had on his shoulder, tried to grip it, but couldn't hold. He let go, leaving his blood on Michael's fingers. Michael tried to reach in and take the hand again, to offer some pathetic kind of comfort, but he knew almost at once that he'd probably do more harm than good. The man's flesh had felt dry and thin. It might even crumble in Michael's hand if he gripped too hard.

Even through the clearing smoke, Michael's eyes were still burning and he had to squeeze them shut as much in pain as in frustration. This thing had smashed through a reinforced concrete wall, maybe killed people... why?

Surely not for him... No. Michael couldn't believe that. The pilot had seen him somewhere before then, maybe? It would be impossible for him to recognize the face of someone he'd met before through all that blood and terror...

'Are... are you looking for me?' Michael asked again, in disbelief, and the burned figure seemed to half smile. Michael could hear Bonnie calling his name, but he kept his eyes fixed on the pilot, watching the trickle of blood that snaked across his forehead and down between his eyes from one of the many lacerations in his skin. The kind of cut, Michael realised, which definitely hadn't been caused by flying shrapnel.

'...No,' the driver whispered in that same ragged, gurgling voice as before. Then he raised his eyes and looked right at Michael, through blood, sweat and broken skin.

He held that half smiling stare for one long, horrible second before Michael realized he was dead.

* * *

Someone was coming.

There had been no one for several minutes. Nothing but silence since he'd stopped responding to Michael's input. He had no idea where Michael had gone, but it wasn't him approaching now.

A sigh, and what seemed to be a quietly muttered, 'Okay... okay, fine.' And then someone slowly and carefully sat down in his driver's seat. '...Hello, KITT.'

The voice was slow and unsure. He searched his databanks. Who in the past had been so hesitant around him? Who else had shown such an anxiety in his presence? A broken, shaky video file in his memory recalled a young secretary sitting hunched up in his passenger seat, swallowing nervously.

_'St...anie?' _

'What? No, I'm not Stephanie, whoever she is, I...' Another hesitation and another long suffering sigh. 'It's Jessica Matthews. Do you remember? I'm your new Third Tier Technician.'

KITT said nothing, and Jessica waited for a whole fifteen seconds.

'Do you remember? Shawn... parked next to me. This morning.'

Pause. Silence. He knew Jessica Matthews. She had a sub file in his personnel databanks dedicated to her. It was relatively empty at this moment in time. A quick glimpse showed up a list of her past degrees and employments –both of them short, but impressive in their references.

Still, she wasn't especially important right now. She didn't fit into any of his essential systems. So he ignored her, running another scan, searching for a non-existent microchip in a non-existent mind.

'This is ridiculous.' The voice –Jessica– sighed. 'You're trying to run programs that aren't even working, you know. Eighty percent of your systems are shut down. And we think some of that is caused by you. Do you think so? Maybe you can help us...'

KITT stayed silent. He focussed upon running another file check, regardless of whether or not his self-analysing program was working correctly.

'I knew Shawn, you know. Not well, but I... miss her.'

KITT had absolutely no doubt that this was not the same. Jessica Matthews knew nothing about Shawn McCormick. She didn't have the chip. _'We...e is sh...? Where ...s Shawn?'_

'We're going to fix you before we worry about anything like that. Right now she's not important to your survival.'

Her tone was almost one of sympathy, but the words were all wrong for that sentiment. Maybe his emotional processors were malfunctioning, too...

_'You ar... n...t essen...ial to my sur...val.' _

'That's where you're wrong,' Jessica's voice said softly, but her body had stiffened slightly, presumably in irritation.

_'Whe...'s Michael?'_

'He's not here. But he said he'd be back very soon. In the meantime, your central processor here needs to have some further repairs.'

_'They ca...wa...t until he's here.'_

Jessica paused. Drew in a sharp breath. 'I'm the one who stopped you breaking up in the first place, you know. If I hadn't restored your primary components with god damn scotch tape and soldering iron you wouldn't be here right now.'

_'Y...u sho...ldn't have...'_

'What do you mean I "shouldn't have"?'

_'I d...n't ...nt that. N...t with...t Sh...n. Not without... th... chip. If you repair the sys... w...out it...' _

'I...' Jessica started to speak, and then trailed off. Her face –what he could make out of it through his half functioning visual sensors– was twisted with what was probably confusion. 'But I did. And you're here. She won't come back. You can choose to work with us here, we're trying to fix you.' She waited a moment. 'Isn't that what Shawn would want?'

Silence.

'Look, if Michael's right and you're just a little freaked out about this, I can tell you it's just like every other time you've been modified in the past, and you don't need to worry about us hurting you. We won't touch anything we don't have to in order to—'

_'...No.' _

'But we—'

_'I said no.' _

The figure seemed to shudder a little. Then she stood up quickly and moved away from his driver's seat, his broken sensors picked up the echoing movement of her high heeled shoes. _Inappropriate footwear for a laboratory technician_ an area of his program mentioned. KITT ignored it and wished that he had the power to set up a subroutine to send it away. 'Alright,' Jessica said, evenly. 'For now. Soon, though. It's unavoidable. We'll turn you off completely to get at you, if we have to.'

The sound of her heels clattered away across the parquet floor. KITT watched her go in silence.


	9. File: Seven

**Short, but functional, and I really didn't want to clutter this chapter up with different scenes. Still, I'll probably come back to this one at a later date. I'm not happy with it.**

* * *

Initial.  
File: Seven.

The most ironic thing about it was that they ended up in spending the next five hours in Chicago Police Headquarters.

Michael's fault. Not that Bonnie had helped the matter. Given the option of either sticking around to help the surviving casualties and ending up being pulled in for questioning by the Police who arrived on the scene barely sixty seconds after the "aircraft" pilot died (the ambulance service took another fifteen minutes) or making a discreet exit without offering their help, they had both agreed to take their chances with the former. Naturally an officer had gotten round to them before they could try to leave unnoticed and the next thing they knew, they were being carted off in a police vehicle to help with inquiries, and being offered countless cups of coffee.

So that was where Bonnie had been for the last five hours (thirteen minutes and twenty six seconds...), struggling to write a coherent statement, when she should have been back at FLAG with KITT.

Michael obviously shared the sentiment. Bonnie had never seen a man so eager to get out of a prison before when he wasn't being held in a cell. He had pulled open the door of the Chevy with significantly more force than was really needed. Asides from that, Bonnie hardly recognized his driving. How could the person who now took turns at forty and interchanges at fifty miles per hour have once been the hot headed, impatient man who regularly smashed up KITT's hardware and turbo-boosted through too-thick concrete on a regular basis?

_'And our latest headline contains a warning to all those planning upon flying into the Sunshine State this weekend. A freak accident earlier today at the California International Airport has police and safety crews baffled and caused substantial damage to the exit terminal building. The area had been quartered off and travellers are advised to use the rail networks or some other means of transportation if planning a long distance trip in the new week or so._

'Twenty six people were injured in the accident but there have been no recorded fatalities. Some form of deliberate attack is suspected as but police can find no evidence of electronics or explosive—'

Michael turned off the radio.

It was an old fashioned thing; Bonnie noticed. In fact, it actually _was_ a radio, rather than a digital system. She was partly surprised that there were still music stations out there which _used_ the old radio satellite broadcast system. This one had no digital modem connection, just wires and dials which squeaked and occasionally sputtered at you. Much like the rest of the nineteen sixties Chevy Michael had come into possession of since she saw him last. It was hard to believe, she thought, that this man who was taking turns at twenty and interchanges at forty miles per hour have once been the hot headed, impatient man who regularly smashed up KITT's hardware and turbo-boosted through too-thick concrete.

Michael didn't look very much like that person at all right now. Bonnie wondered how long it had been since he had.

'The engine runs very smoothly, considering...'

At least she succeeded in starting up some form of conversation. Michael smiled wryly. 'Considering what? The fact that she's older than her driver or the fact that it's my car in the first place?'

Bonnie managed to conjure up a smile herself. 'Now, Michael, we all know you're an excellent driver. And by "excellent" I don't necessarily mean "safe" or "controlled".'

'Took me months to fix her up right again after the last time I came back here, Michael added after a moment. 'She's never been the same since KITT drove it off a pier.'

'...If I asked, would you actually tell me?'

'If I told you, would you refrain from whacking me over the head with something?'

'Probably not?'

'In that case I reserve my right to remain silent.' Michael said.

Coming from him, the words sounded oddly appropriate. Of course, Bonnie remembered the records. A police station had been Michael's second home once. He'd had a career with them, a life. But then again, he'd also had a singing job at some point, and a car that talked and about half a dozen fake identities in the criminal underworld. These were all things Michael had left behind in the second of his three lifetimes. If this kept up, Bonnie thought, he was going to lose track of the number of lives he'd had and the number of people he'd been.

Maybe he was losing track already. After all, the woman named Bonnie Barstow belonged with his second life, and yet here she was, Bonnie thought, present in his third. Sitting beside him in a well-worn Chevy and staring at the dashboard, feeling like she was trying to figure out where the "Turbo Boost" button was.

Three lifetimes gone. He was obviously still trying to figure it out.

'Jesus, Bonnie,' Michael said after they had driven another hundred metres or so in silence. 'I'm sorry about all this. The last thing I meant was to spend the last five hours filling out witness reports...'

'It's not your fault. The chances are you saved our lives by making me go the other direction. We could've been in front of that thing at the time. It's actually kind of amazing that nobody was killed in the first place.'

Michael didn't respond to this, and Bonnie found herself peering at him more closely, trying to work out what his silence could mean. Granted, neither of them had had an exactly pleasant five and a half hours, and with KITT still in pieces back at FLAG about to have god-only-knew-what done to him, it stood to reason that Michael would be a little jumpy, but... no. There was more to it than that, Bonnie was sure of it. '...Michael? Is something wrong?'

'You mean asides from the obvious?' Michael asked, almost dryly.

'Yeah, asides from that. You've got that expression on your face. It mean trouble.'

Michael blinked, and Bonnie wasn't sure if his ignorance was feigned or not, but it made her smile either way. 'You mean that expression?'

Bonnie smiled. 'Yeah, that expression, stranger.'

'You remember it?'

'There are a lot of things I remember. But how to read your mind isn't one of them. Elaborate.'

Bonnie settled herself as best she could in the old Chevy's seating, trying momentarily, to take her mind off the thought of KITT in pieces back at the FLAG laboratories.

'Probably nothing,' Michael said. 'Just that... I keep thinking about that accident back there. I sat there with him. I saw him _die_. He looked right at me and saw me standing there, not able to do a damn thing about it.

Bonnie crossed and uncrossed her legs, hoping the action didn't betray her nervousness. Quite frankly she had no idea in hell what her emotions were trying to do to her today. She had seen that look in Michael's eyes before, a long time ago. Death wasn't something anyone ever got used to, or ever truly forgot about. 'Then no wonder you're upset. Michael, there was nothing that you could've done. He was probably doomed from the very beginning.'

'It's not just that,' Michael shook his head, briefly, clutching the steering wheel the same way he always used to clutch KITT's. 'There's more to it. The craft, for one thing. Didn't you notice anything strange about that?'

Bonnie paused before nodding, betraying her own, silent doubts about what had happened. 'For a start even from where I was standing, it looked damn small for a vehicle that could supposedly experience a crash like that.'

'Exactly,' Michael said. 'It seemed so small and light... Like it couldn't have crashed through a paper bag never mind a strengthened concrete wall. I kept trying to think of ways it could work... how much momentum would something that size need to build up to do damage like that?'

'You're asking a cyberneticist here, Michael not a physicist,' Bonnie said. 'But I'd hazard a guess that it would take a damn high level of speed. Likely greater than anything KITT could produce. Last I checked, anyway.'

'As in greater than any force that a small glider engine would be capable of putting out?' Michael asked, mysteriously.

Bonnie stayed silent, but then she supposed her silence was the answer. Michael certainly seemed to nod in understanding. '...Bonnie, he said my name.'

Bonnie paused. Her legs half crossed and half uncrossed, her fingers curled tightly around her knee. A tremor seemed to pass up her spine. 'What do you mean?'

'I mean what it sounds like I mean. The pilot of the craft. He looked me right in the eye and he... said my name,' Michael sounded like he couldn't quite believe it, no matter how many times he repeated the events inside of his head. 'He called me "Knight." And his face.. .the mess it was in... it wasn't just burns and blood, Bonnie. There were cuts that shouldn't have been there. Bruises...' he shook his head hard, as if trying to dislodge the image from his brain without losing track of his rather disturbing trail of thought. The inside of the old chevy suddenly felt extraordinarily cold, despite the unusually adequate heating system.

'Michael?' Bonnie prompted when, after another one hundred metres of highway and a roundabout, he still hadn't spoken.

'The cuts,' Michael muttered, softly, fingers tracing the steering wheel. 'The abrasions on his face... like Shawn's.'

Bonnie shivered. 'Shawn? Wait, Michael, I don't understand what you mean by that... do you think what happened to Shawn...'

'I don't know what I think,' Michael muttered. 'Bonnie, I really don't know... anything anymore... We'll explain the case of Shawn when we get there, though. After you've had a chance to see KITT. After I have for that matter, he's probably worried sick by now, I said I'd only be a short while and he's been stuck there with Jessica...'

'Jessica...' Bonnie repeated. 'As in Matthews?'

'She mentioned that you know her.'

Bonnie blinked. 'Know her? I taught her for three years. Actually, she was one of my top students at Harvard.' Bonnie smiled vaguely, suddenly remembering that at this exact moment in time she was supposed to be hosting a lecture at the University on the role of artificial learning techniques in cybernetics. She still hadn't contacted them to tell her where the heck she was...

Michael shifted his hands on the wheel, seeming suddenly more alert and eager to follow this new subject. 'And what did you think of her? I mean... was she friendly?'

Bonnie bit her lip, thinking carefully about her words before speaking them. 'Friendly... wouldn't be the term I'd use for her. Reliable –yes. Talented –certainly. She knew cybertronics as well as any qualified technician I ever knew, and she seemed to get on averagely with her classmates, despite the occasional... lapse.'

'Lapse?' Michael's tone asked a question. Bonnie shrugged, not entirely certain how to explain the phenomenon that had been Jessica Matthew's three and a half years under her tutelage at Harvard.

'Just... odd moments. Not unlike the ones I see in you, actually,' she smiled. 'he would say something unusual, . But most people just accepted it from her. She was always very formal and proper where it counted. She's with KITT right now, isn't she? His new third tier. I spoke to her.'

'Yeah,' Michael said, and then added. 'That bothers you?'

'Not... really. I'm sure she'll be perfectly capable of anything handed to her,' Bonnie said. 'But...'

'You don't think she'll get along with KITT.'

Bonnie was perhaps less surprised by Michael's insight here than she could have been. 'How did you guess?'

'Something about the way she acts around him... still refuses to call him a "he", for one thing. It's always "It" or "Knight Industries Four Thousand".'

'She was uncomfortable with people,' Bonnie nodded. 'I could tell, despite the good face she put onto hide it. She had obviously trained herself as much in the ways of social interaction as she ever had in cybernetics. Sometimes I'd catch her rehearsing things to say before meeting a new tutor, or at an after class celebration of sorts... she always seemed to wear this mask that only took her as far as her technology took her.'

Bonnie looked at him. Michael kept his eyes firmly on the road, seemingly in thought. The Chevy's engine spluttered, as if trying to get his attention. 'I think that's why she's so into computers. Computers she can handle. She doesn't have to predict them or ask them to behave. And now all of a sudden she's being presented with the thing she tries to avoid in people and never had to worry about in machines – a piece of technology with a personality. At the moment, a very frayed and likely very scared personality...' Bonnie bit her tongue. 'I'm not sure that she and KITT would be able to... cope with each other. Not now, not in these particular circumstances.'

'You certainly know a lot about her.'

'I know... and maybe it's not polite of me to tell you all this,' bonnie muttered, suddenly realising how much her words could be interpreted as interfering. 'But... it's important that you understand each other, Michael. She's talented, but she's not very open. I think...' She sighed. 'Jessica and KITT could be more unhealthy for each other than not.'

'Still the concerned mother,' Michael murmured.

'Always, yoyo,' Bonnie sighed. Michael obviously wasn't willing to delve back into this particular subject at this moment in time. Bonnie swallowed.

'You're going after them, aren't you? Shawn's killers.'

'Trying to. At the moment, the only possible leads we have are her body, the remains o the Knight Industries Four Thousand, and some place name. Mistletoe Valley.'

'Mistletoe...' Bonnie's eyebrow rose involuntarily. 'Sounds like something from—'

'A kid's picture book. Yeah, that's what we've all been saying. It's the place where—' Michael paused to beep his horn rather suddenly at a motorist who decided to switch lanes without signalling. Looked like some things didn't change. Michael still hated bad driving. '...Where they found Shawn's body... and KITT. The forensics haven't come back from the lab yet, hardy any of KITT's software was working when I left, I barely managed to sneak a glimpse of the coroner's report for Shawn... oh, and did I mention that the current head of Knight Industries has vanished off the face of the earth?'

'Maddock?' Bonnie wrinkled her nose, slightly. 'I remember him from an old Tennis club... I was never fond of the guy.'

Michael shrugged, as if wanting to agree with her, but feeling slightly reluctant to. It was the kind of reaction he had, Bonnie remembered, when he had met someone for whom he was at least partly respectful; but otherwise in contempt of. 'He has his plus sides, but right now I'm having a hard time remembering what they are. I just don't see why he'd vanish right now... he was always dedicated to FLAG and I can't believe he'd do something that would undermine it...'

'So what's the plan?'

'Not much of one, at the moment. There's the lead in Mistletoe Valley... I could follow that. Plus, the pilot back there...'

'You don't really think it's connected, do you?'

'Like I said, Bonnie, right now I can't make head not tail of any of this, but you can bet that I will... after we get you back to KITT. I have some questions I need to ask and some places I need to visit.'

Bonnie stifled a groan. 'You know you can't go out there on your own. The odds are if anyone really went after Shawn at this place, they could be waiting for someone else from FLAG to show up.'

'I doubt it. They would've picked off the crews that found Shawn and KITT the last time, if that were the case.'

'Even so it's risky,' Bonnie said. 'I would show extreme caution before even setting a foot near that place. It might have a cutesy name but it's still where they found two bodies. You shouldn't go there alone.'

'I wasn't planning on it.'

'And you can't take KITT out there either,' bonnie added quickly. 'Even if he were in one piece, Michael—'

'If he were in one piece' Michael interrupted. 'Then he'd want to find those murderers as much as I do, Bonnie. As it happens, I'll take the load for both of us for now.'

Bonnie sighed, in semi-defeat. 'That won't help him.'

'Maybe not, but it'll make me feel like I'm doing a damn sight more than sitting around and getting in the way of FLAG's technical department,' Michael said, somewhat bitterly. Bonnie could only imagine right now the other-worldly atmosphere that awaited them back at this new and improved FLAG, with which both of them had had so little contact.

'I'm sure KITT doesn't consider you an interference. _My_ priority right now is the living, Michael. Shawn's dead, but KITT's still here. As long as I've got that to look after anything else can wait. Maybe you should think about waiting too.'

Michael stayed quiet for a while before nodding his response and, satisfied that this was an indicator of his full agreement, Bonnie leant back in the seat and fell quiet herself, for at least another two miles.

'Michael?'

'Mm?'

'There's one thing I don't remember... Why you left.'

'That's because I never told you, Bon.'

'Ah... that would explain it.'  



	10. File: Eight

**The song in my head for this chapter was Electric Light's orchestra (ELO)'s "The Way Life's Meant to Be." In my fandom imaginings, Michael is as fond of them as I am (their album time is a particularly enjoyable, whimsical tale about time travel and no, I'm not going to tell you how that's relevant to the story right now, you'll have to work it out). Otherwise, I have no explanation. Standard disclaimers apply. Reviews and concrit are appreciated. ****

* * *

**

Initial.  
File: Eight.

In truth, this hadn't been the way she planned to spend her retirement.

Claire Elliot was a secondary tier technician who had worked in the Foundation for Law and Government's technical department for over ten years. For the last five of those years she has been assigned to the system-and-database-upkeep of the Knight Industries Four Thousand's microprocessor –the artificial intelligence known as KITT.

It wasn't where she had imagined she would be. No, at this point in her life, Claire Elliot had pictured herself sitting in a deckchair in a little garden somewhere by the coast of a small retirement town, with her husband besides her and a subscription to technical Century magazine in her lap. She had never been able to work out in her mind whether or not that prospect of her future was an appealing one, or frightening.

It had never come to pass, either way. Now at the age of sixty three, and with her husband long dead from a heart condition, Claire Elliot was still working for the Foundation of Law and Government as one of their most notable technicians in the field of cybernetics. Everyone knew her and everyone (almost) treated her with respect, because they knew fine well what she was capable of.

KITT, too, had been amongst those people. His greetings always polite and courteous, with little sign of the snobbishness she had heard he was so famous for. To think of him silent and broken like this was, in short, as terrifying as it would be of he were a flesh and blood teammate.

Not all of the department felt this way. In fact, the majority of them didn't view KITT as anything more than a highly sophisticated piece of equipment which they had to repair more frequently than any of them would've liked. But then again, Claire thought, the majority of them hadn't worked with him for as long as she had. There are times when she yearns for the old day, when the department had consisted of no more than fifteen people and KITT had still operated on the old, bubble-chip memory system that had been replaced when he became the Knight Industries Four Thousand.

And this was not the first time that she had taken part in such a massive system repair for the Knight Industries two Thousand. In her time with FLAG, she had aided the complete rebuilding of the car at least twice. Three times, if you counted this one. She had never been entirely certain about anything where KITT was concerned. She knew her job and she did it well, and she wouldn't hesitate to agree that she was rather... fond of the AI. Fond enough that the attitude of their new third tier technician was grinding on her nerves ever so slightly.

'Hey, Elliot, my good lady, how's it coming in the smart-peoples department.'

Claire looked up from the monitor she had been studying carefully (should she repair those file directories now or wait until Miss Matthews had had a chance to go over the CPU again?) and faced the young brunette boy in workman's slacks who had just entered the room.

'Hello, Chris. Come back for your radio?'

'Nah, Tommy boy can keep it for a while, I say he needs more experiences of culture and tradition. Where is he, anyway?'

'He's round the back talking to the rebuilding specialists about getting the molecular bonding restored. Where you should be, as a matter of fact, aren't you supposed to be an external mechanic?'

'Man, anyone would think you weren't thrilled to see me, old girl,' Chris grinned at her broadly. "The smile of the youthful", Claire sometimes whimsically called it. It had been many years since she had been capable of such brashness and confidence. Those were things that age, arthritis and the deaths of those you loved tended to drive out of you. 'I'm on break.'

'Another one?'

'Hey, it's only my second in three hours,' Chris pulled himself up to sit on the computer panel, in the manner of a child. 'Look if this is about that stuff with the driver earlier, you know I didn't mean anything by it, right? I just wanted to know, that's all, like the rest of us. _Shy bairns get nowt_, you know.'

'Well that doesn't mean that... I beg your pardon?' Claire paused, blinking.

'What? Oh, "shy bairns get nowt"? It's an old British phrase I got from my folks. My grandpa's from the north of England.'

'I _know_ what it means, boy,' Claire sighed, impatiently. Despite her being a woman who could understand twenty three different types of computer programming code, from python to perl, regional dialects had never been her strong point. Sometimes she had couldn't even remember whether KITT's voice was Bostonian or Texan. 'And for someone who quotes his dear grandfather so often, you don't seem to have much respect for your elders. You shouldn't be so flippant around Tom, I swear one of these days he'll put you in your place for it.'

'I don't doubt it, old lady. But seriously...'

'Yes, yes, I know. You didn't mean anything by it, you were just curious, like we all are.' Claire opted against modifying the directories and cut back to her previous screen, displaying a list of the Knight Industries Four Thousand's many broken components which needed to be repaired.

There was silence between them for a moment. In truth, Claire was aware that for all his bravado and ignorance, Chris was an especially cruel individual. He was young, as she had been once, and eager to learn without losing his street cred. The problem was he hadn't yet worked out that "street cred" had no place whatsoever on the FLAG technical team, and his old high school friends weren't here to cheer him on, should he come out with a particularly smart gag or retort.

Normally, she wouldn't think of offloading her woes on Christopher askew, of all people. Right now, however, she was tired, and had been working for nineteen hours sustained by coffee and adrenaline, and she needed to mention it to someone. '...She's still calling him an "it".'

'What? Who?'

'Miss Matthews. KITT,' Claire sighed, straightening her back. Damn these computer consoles being designed in such a way that it was impossible to sit down and work at the same time. She was really getting too old for this.

'Jesus, Claire, not you too, what's with all of this "Miss Matthews" garbage? I betcha she doesn't call you "Mrs Elliot"... 'Sides, are you so sure he's not?' Chris shrugged, glancing back at the platform behind them where the Knight Industries Four Thousand still sat in ruins. 'I mean, c'mon, Claire, it's a computer, right?'

'Spoken like a man who's never had a conversation with "that computer" about Marcel Duchamp,' Claire responded, briskly, not taking her eyes off the screen in front of her. She was currently channelling information directly from the stored memory banks of KITT's that they kept at the facility, trying in vain to restore them. It was a near impossible task, what with the damage that had been inflicted on the AI's main CPU.

'...Who the heck is Duchamp?'

'I rest my case. And by the way, that's not a chair you're sitting on.'

Chris rolled his eyes, but Claire was glad to see him remove himself from the computer console. 'I'm pretty sure the car doesn't mind. Lots of people around here call the car "it", you know.'

'Really? You don't.'

'Well, no but... 'Chris paused, scratching his head, seemingly uncharacteristically unsure of himself.

'But you know him.' Claire prompted. 'She doesn't, and this isn't really the time for us to be having to explain the technicalities.' She sighed, leaning away from the computer. 'You have no idea just how much damage we're having to repair right now or just how complicated it gets. I understand that Miss Matthews... that Jessica is very talented in this particular area of cybernetics, but...'

'But what?'

'But KITT won't let her touch him,' Claire said, eventually.

'Come again?'

'You heard, he's... not in agreement with her,' Claire paused. Honesty, in ten years she was still not entirely used to talking. It was the way most other relationships in the world were: they always seemed easier to understand and more logical within your own head. Sixty three years of experience, and Claire was fairly certain this was still something she'd only learned since she'd started working for FLAG. He's afraid. You know how he reacts around people when he's afraid.'

'Actually, no I don't, but for simplicities sakes let's assume that I do and move right along. Wasn't he talking perfectly fine to Knight a few hours ago? He even said a few words to you, right? What's different now?'

'What's different is that his memory banks came back online in the interim,' Claire muttered, anxiously, tapping the computer sensor pad gentle with her fingertip. 'We're thinking maybe this isn't a technical problem so much as a mental one, and Jessica's looking for technical. She can't fix him that way, even if she does get into his CPU.

Chris was quiet for a moment, as he was actually, for once, taking in everything she said.

'...Oh-kay. So. Forgive this lowly physical mechanic for being so unremarkably dense, old lady... but how exactly is the car gonna _stop_ you doing what you need to do to fit it? It's just a box right now, it's not like it can use that fancy electric shock system it has to keep you away.'

'No, but that's not the point.'

'Then what is the point?' Chris frowned. 'I get the feeling that I'm missing something here.'

Claire shut down a page, deciding it would probably be better not to touch anything at all right now, now with the AI's systems balanced as precariously as they were. This meant she would likely spend the next hour or so checking over information she'd already checked a thousand times over and continuing to endure on caffeine alone.

'It's the principle of the issue, Chris. Where KITT is concerned, that's always complicated. Not everyone here deals with it in the same way, but I've been around for long enough to know what works with him and what doesn't. You wouldn't cut someone open without assuring yourself than they'd let you first.'

'You would in an emergency situation. Like having your appendix out, I mean, what doctor is going to wait until the guy has filled in the right forms?'

Claire couldn't think of an answer to this which did not involve rolling her eyes. 'I admit you have a point. What with the state his systems are in right now, we might not have time to wait around for Knight to make another appearance...'

'So why don't you talk to him?'

Claire stopped working for a moment. Looked Chris in the eye. 'You've worked here longer, right?' Chris shrugged. 'He knows you better. So talk to him, I mean even if you don't convince him you've got to get a better reaction out of the buy than "Miss Matthews" is getting.'

Another good point. For a pain-in-the-neck layabout, Chris certainly seemed to make a lot of those. She glanced between the computer and the platform a few more times, thinking.

Honestly, what harm could it possibly do?

* * *

Of course, KITT knew he had to face the facts about his current situation.

The odds were that Jessica was right –his CPU system was in serious need of repairs. Eventually, they would carry out those repairs, whether he wanted them to or not. The bare threads of connection to the car that he still possessed were flickering in and out of focus. His CPU, held together, as Jessica had said, with little more than smouldering, could not hold out in this condition. Several of the references in relation to the technician Jessica Matthews had noted her for her competence and dedication to her work. She would not listen to his protests when she came to repair him again. She couldn't afford to.

So KITT waited. He sensed the movement of the technicians all around him. Occasionally one would approach him and attempt to strike up conversation but, for the most part, KITT ignored them.

And then, someone else came.

Not Jessica this time, or Michael returning from wherever he had disappeared to, but someone else altogether. He could tell from the variations in pressure on the preceptors which were still functioning. He couldn't be entirely sure just what the sensors were telling him, but he knew that this persons form and weight matched neither Jessica nor Michaels. In truth, had KITT's technical-team database currently been functional, he would have realised that it matched not a single person in the entire department, or the profile of any individual who had ever worked on or inside of him before.

But those particular databases were not functioning. KITT had no idea who this person was. At least, not until she spoke.

'Hello, KITT.'

The sensation... the careful distribution of weight on the body in his driver's chair. A smell, a touch on his perceptor surfaces, the hand brushing against his dash with the ring upon its second figure.

That smell was the thing which actually puzzled KITT the most. Hadn't someone mentioned to him earlier that his olfactory sensors had been utterly destroyed? He shouldn't have been aware of smelling anything. The few diagnostic routines he had seemed almost to be shivering in dread. Something about the situation was very, very wrong, but his systems weren't in any state to be analysing it and working out what.

'Wow...' the voice again, belonging to no one who should have been present. 'We really took it at a run this time, didn't we? I'm sorry I screwed up. I didn't mean...' a pause, a hand brushed a functioning sensor. His sensory systems operated through fibre optics and force fields which were (usually) spread out across his body. Finding a currently working one amongst the broken should have been difficult, and yet this person's hand found them easily, as if it knew exactly where to reach in amongst all the damaged ones. 'I'm sorry. I guess I got my calculations wrong... I underestimated it. I underestimated you.'

KITT knew who he was speaking to, now. Except for the fact that it could not be possible.

_'Shawn...?' _

'KITT.'

Shawn.

He couldn't access his auditory analysers, but something told him that this voice, this sound, most certainly belonged to her. There was no one else it might've been.

'It's me. I'm right here. In every way that counts at least. Are you alright?'

KITT didn't answer. Truthfully, he wasn't certain how he could. He knew of stories of humans talking with those who were dead all the time, out of habit or a means of comfort, but he was not human and his natural configurations usually denied him such fantasies. He had not held a single conversation with Devon since his death. Nor Stevie. Why now should Shawn be standing before him, seeming for all the world like the chip in their minds still bound them both together and she had never disappeared.

'They're trying to repair you. Your systems are damaged, but it seems you won't allow them near you. You shouldn't do that; they don't want to have to force you.'

KITT didn't answer. How, exactly, was he supposed to give an answer to something which he could only suppose was a figment of his imagination?

'Is that important to you?' Shawn answered the statement he had not spoken aloud.

Shawn. Sitting in his driver's chair, her blood on her own seat, hand brushing a perceptor. It was not possible that she could be here. There was still a gaping hole in his mind where his access to the chip should have been.

_'...You're dead.'_

'And you're being a stubborn fool. Honestly, what're you waiting for? Me?'

She rested her arms against his dash. Which was as impossible as anything else she was doing. Her very presence made no sense. Had his logical systems been functioning properly, KITT have the feeling they probably would've shut down then and there.

'KITT, you idiot, you know the chip is gone, it's no use waiting...'

_'Y...u_ ar..._dead,'_ KITT repeated, louder this time, as if that might help him to convince himself of its veracity. _'Mich...el told ...e.'_

Shawn paused for a moment, then sighed in a way which was very much human and more alive than it really should have been. 'Yes. It's unlikely that Michael would lie to you, so I suppose I must be. But you're not. You _might_ yet be, if you don't allow them to fix you, though. You have an eighty eight percent chance of total system failure within the next two hours if you don't allow it.'

'...That is true. So why don't you accept that? Let them fix you, KITT. Michael's not going to be happy if he comes back to find you dead, too.'

_'Tha... is an exagge...ion . I am capa...le of copi... unt... hi... return.' _

'Really? You're certain of that?' Shawn frowned. 'Ninety two percent of your systems are offline or not functioning. Any repairs they've done already are being mitigated by the damage to your central processor. Now you're not just going to die, but you're going to die while _conscious_ of it, instead of in the blackness there was before. And why? Because you're waiting for me? Hoping they'll find the chip?'

KITT wanted to tell her "but you're here right now" and yet the words felt wrong. Unreal. She could not be here. This was a malfunction caused by the damage to his systems, or some other illusion crafted by his damaged visuals systems. Shawn could not possibly be here.

He'd felt her disappear. He'd felt it...

'KITT? Do you even know what's wrong with you right now?'

He waited a second before answering, feeling somewhat concerned for his own sanity. _'...I ...eg your par...on?'_

'If you can answer that, then I might believe you when you say you can wait,' Shawn said. 'Tell me, KITT. What's the matter?'

KITT hesitated. To answer that question, he knew he would have had to access databanks he wasn't in control of right now. Use systems that had been half shot to pieces by... whatever it was that had shot them to pieces.

But then again, for him to answer that question Shawn would also have to be alive to _ask_ it, which of course she wasn't, and...

This was very confusing. 'I don't know...'

'Really?' Shawn's presence seemed to half-laugh. 'That's a first...' She leant back, her presence firmly there, but not there. 'So let them work it out for themselves, KITT, please? You can't go back to Mistletoe like this.'

KITT thought. The name was familiar: something Michael had mentioned earlier.

_'The v...lley?'_

'You heard me, KITT,' Shawn's voice was calm, composed, that of someone living. 'Just try and use that immense, logical, egotistical brain of yours. Once it's put back together that is. You'll know. We'll deal with it later.'

_'...We?'_

'Yes, KITT. We. Is that alright with you?'

KITT said nothing. And what seemed like less than a second later Shawn had disappeared again, so suddenly that she might as well have never been there. And, in truth, she could not have.

'...Hey there, KITT. Remember me?'

Someone else. The voice speaking now had a warm edge to it, a sensation of familiarity, but it was not Shawn's voice, so KITT did not answer it. 'It's Claire. Claire Elliot? I'm one of your second tier technicians. I hear you're having issues with our new tech, huh? I thought maybe you might help us out here...'

Nothing. He was still trying to process the empty space where Shawn had been for a few, brief seconds. But at least he acknowledged her presence. Elliot, first name Claire. Employed at FLAG for over ten years, holder of two degrees in.

Hs information banks became cloudy at about this point, his systems too corroded to read them correctly. 'Mind if I sit?' Claire went on, regardless. 'I've been on my feet since half past two this morning, you know.'

KITT said nothing, and in response, Claire didn't sit. She stood there, with the weight on her feet. 'Alright, then I'll talk standing up. It's not like you haven't given us the silent treatment before. Remember Aspen, 1989? Michael drove you off a pier? We found a starfish on your left seat?'

Silence, for a long moment, and then the not-Shawn presence seemed to wink in KITT's mind.

_'...You may sit ...own, Claire.' _

He thought she might be smiling, but he was losing the last of his visual sensors, so... 'God, you have no idea how glad I am you said that.' Claire's weight in his seat a few seconds later was barely discernable, but it was there nonetheless. 'You know, KITT, you're giving us something of a hard time over here...'

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	11. File: Nine

**The song in my head for this chapter was Electric Light's orchestra (ELO)'s "The Way Life's Meant to Be." In my fandom imaginings, Michael is as fond of this band as I am. Otherwise, I have no explanation. Standrad disclaimers apply. Reviews and concrit are appreciated.**

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_'Hello and welcome back to the Six O Clock Show on broadcast station ScienceGold 16.5, I'm Miles Hanway and as most of you will already know, I've been having some very interesting conversations with Stuart Hephton, employee of Baldtson Laboratories Technical Division. Many of our regular viewers may Stuart here as the famous research scientist who worked on such projects as the Algae-Based fuel systems of the nineteen-nineties the new fuel-systems for the _Louisiana Cellracer_: The land-speed record breaking machine which was funded by and created for millionaire Dennis Row, who was killed earlier this week in a freak accident at his home testing track in California. Mister Hephton, welcome back to the show.' _

'Good to be here as always, Miles. I don't believe I've asked yet, how are the kids?'

'They're well, thank you. Getting bigger every minute I'm not looking at them... Now, we went through this briefly before the break, but would you care to recount to our viewers who may have just tuned in, exactly how events took place on the day you heard of Dennis Row's tragic death?'

'Mm. A bad day. I received the call quite early in the morning, not long after the accident. A close friend of mine who had been on the track with Den at the time was good enough to contact me. I believe his exact words on the line were um... "Billy, I think the project's going to take a few steps back for a while", and then when I, in my half asleep state, questioned him further he... told me that Den had been killed.'

'That must have come as a shock.'

Well, obviously we were all taken aback. We'd been working on the concepts and construction of the Cellracer_ since the spring of 2001, and I don't think there was a working day we didn't see Dennis down at the lab, just checking up on how we were coming along. He was always very interested in what we were creating. Understand he was a very hands-on individual; he hated to be away from the project for any length of time. Why, our vendors must have taken in hundreds of dollars from him what with all the coffee he drank in the foyers.' _

'It sounds like he had a close relationship with your team.'

'Indeed, he did, he was on speaking terms with many of us. Even after the Racer was completed, he'd continue to show up, just to talk with us and keep in contact with the friends he'd made here. We all knew the risks of his ...chosen past times, but for it to actually happen, and in a custom vehicle designed by engineers at one of our own facilities...'

'Yes, I understand that Baldtson is a fairly recent, but booming industry in North America and Europe with branches in every area from... mechanics to cybernetics and even medical studies and looks set to begin rivalling such departments as Knight Industries in terms of production and contribution to society. And from what I also hear, until now, there has never been a known accident caused by one of your productions.'

'No, and there still is not. Understand, Miles, that Dennis Row's accident is exactly that. An accident. We have gone over the prototypes and designs of the machine a thousand times in search of anything which might have caused such a freak failure at those speeds.'

'And you found nothing?'

'No... Though I confess, in spite of my reputation being on the line, a part of me did hope that we would turn up something –anything– which might have linked with Dennis's death. To offer us some kind of an explanation. Even one which forced the blame upon us would have been preferable to the horrible uncertainty that must be felt by Dennis's family right now. Of course, sometimes there are no explanations. Particularly not for circumstances such as these. Maybe one of the parts was installed incorrectly, maybe the computer malfunctioned, maybe he didn't give the engine enough time to heat up... Maybe he got one of those candy wrappers of his stuck in the emergency braking system, hell, I have no idea.'

'Do you believe the media is blaming Baldtson Tech for the failure of Mr Row's Equipment?'

'...I apologise, I must have sounded very harsh just know, the fact of it is, though, that we've all been under scrutiny. The Baldtson technical department has not had a single industrial accident in over twenty-five years, and now for this to happen... well, it's raising questions we have to admit we aren't entirely able to answer.'

'What answers do you think you can provide us with? Just theoretically.'

'...Well, I'm no expert on the subject of World Record breakers... my purpose on the team was mainly scientific, but I am aware of just how dangerous their chosen ambition is. The fastest, safest machine in the world is no safer than any other vehicle if the driver is careless.'

'Of course, but there must be something which can explain why such a technically proficient driver simply... lost control? As a leading technician of the Cellracer project, surely you can offer some insight?'

'The explanation I believe, Miles, comes down to that oh so common problem where all high tech machinery is concerned: The simple issue of human error. Den was a fine driver, easily one of the best in the world and no worse for his strange... obsession with racing death to the wire every chance he got. But even the best amongst us make mistakes. In a car travelling at over four hundred miles per hour, such mistakes are almost always fatal.'

'I take, it then, that–forgive me my bluntness– you believe that your people have not made any mistakes?

'I can't say anything with all certainty at this point, Miles, you know that. But I can say that Baldtson Laboratories are highly unlikely to be in any way to blame for this tragedy. The reality is that Dennis Row was a man with a thirst for danger and a passion that took him places most men would fear to tread. And some things simply don't work out the way they should in Hollywood...'

'Pardon me for being as relieved by that fact as I am concerned, Mister Hephton.'

'Oh, no pardo**n't**_ is necessary, no_**t here** _pardon at all... I truly believe that w_**ait**_e i, the industry have a duty to... uphol_**et go**_...d the st_**op it n...w, stop i...t**_... us of theeeeee_eeeeeee-------**---  
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**

It wasn't anything like she had expected it to be. But then again, Bonnie wasn't at all certain what she had expected in the first place.

'...I can't believe I'm doing this.'

'Doing what?' Michael asked, seeming to feel a need to keep cracking jokes to ease the tension around them. 'Returning to the old days? Basking in the nostalgia of a building that... actually looks nothing like the place you used to work?' He trailed off, shrugging slightly, clearly realising that this place really didn't conjure up any real images of the "good old days". The startlingly white FLAG buildings reminded Bonnie of the airport terminals, or of hospital wards. The days of a single transportable lab contained in the back of a black ten wheeler and a single roomed technician's laboratory in the middle of a large, stony mansion seemed a lifetime away.

Of course, for Michael, she supposed it really was a lifetime.

'I mean signing in,' Bonnie muttered, lowering her voice so as not to annoy the secretary.

'Well it's not like they know who we are...'

'I know that,' Bonnie bit her tongue. 'I know, just... signing in, Michael. Since when did FLAG utilise the "name on the list or you're not getting in" system?'

'Since about nineteen-ninety-five, I think,' Michael answered. 'When the employment roster changed from five to fifteen-hundred.'

Bonnie paused and blinked. 'Fifteen-hundred? I knew the roster had gone up, but not by that much...'

'Wow, I did my homework to a higher level than you. Now that's a first.'

Bonnie could've chosen to whack him about the head again for that, but since she'd already done so three times on the journey there, she restricted herself to just smiling.

Still, she tried to wait patiently for the secretary to run up their names on the computer's list of acceptable entrees. First they'd had to walk a quarter of a mile through a cramped parking lot after finding the only space they could was about as far away from the building as you could get, and now the only thing standing between her and KITT was a secretary and a computer program. And if there was one thing which hadn't improved with decades of technological advancement, it was the checking-in system.

Eventually, "BARSTOW, Bonnie" and "KNIGHT, Michael" showed up on the list of personnel accepted into the main technical areas, and bonnie was off down the corridor in a shot, with Michael less than two steps behind her. Which, Bonnie soon realised, was just as well, because no sooner had she existed the main foyer through the large double doors at the back, did she find herself completely lost.

The technical department of FLAG appeared to have turned into a kind of labyrinth since Bonnie had last been here. The new buildings were white and sterile, and every door she came to was shut tightly, hiding buzz of activity away from the corridor outside.

Michael caught up with her just in time to pin a freshly printed "PROFESSIONAL VISITOR" badge on her lapel. 'Well, professor...' he said cautiously, wanting to joke but not quite feeling brave enough. 'What do you think of the new Knight Industries?'

'Well, it's...' Bonnie swallowed. 'It's very...'

'Different?' Michael suggested, falling into step beside her as they walked slowly through the long corridor, slowly gaining their bearings together.

'I was going to say hospital-efficient and organized,' Bonnie said, 'but your way works, too. Okay, I give up,' she paused, gesturing around with her hand. 'Which way to the Main Lab?'

Michael opened his mouth, as if to respond to her, then hesitated, closed it, opened it about. 'I... don't actually remember.'

'You don't remember.' Bonnie repeated, drolly. 'But you've already been here.'

'Well I came in the back way before, not through the front... unofficial-like.'

Bonnie hissed out through her teeth. That was, of course, exactly like Michael. They left one sterile white corridor and entered a cross roads of three others. 'Well why didn't we just go in the way you did last time?'

'Thought you might appreciate my new found sense of procedure and protocol?' Michael shrugged. Bonnie refused to dignify that statement with a response. Instead she kept walking, glancing uneasily from side to side, trying to make out something of the old FLAG in amongst all this clean, unfriendly whiteness.

A two hour flight from Massachusetts, five hours in a police statement office and twenty minutes standing at the entrance of the building had left Bonnie ill prepared for the cold blankness of what she would find here. Coming back to FLAG should have brought up nostalgia, and comforting old memories that would make her feel slightly better about exactly what she was going to meet, but she saw nothing of the old Knight Industries in this place.

They kept walking. Every now and then someone would emerge from a door and offer her a nod or a brief smile, but there seemed to be no one she recognized. The faces were mostly young and fresh and reminded her all too intensely of the crows feet around her eyes. It became clear that Michael must have had at least some vague idea of where they were, because he had taken hold of her arm and taken a step ahead of her. Bonnie did not pull away, preferring to keep her hand firmly pressed into in his until they (finally) found the department they were looking for.

The room which they had entered seemed far brighter than the corridors had, which was due mostly, Bonnie found, to the massive hexagonal skylight overhead. They were on a walkway suspended what she could only presume was the lab itself, But it was impossible to make out what was happening exactly, beyond the metal grill and screens below. Below were the constant, familiar sounds of machinery and computers, but that was all about the scene that was familiar.

'Not exactly the semi, huh?' Michael said, softly, and Bonnie couldn't tell if it was nostalgia tingeing the corners of his tone, or... something else. Something deeper and more worrying. Something like regret.

'I should hope not,' a voice said behind them, interrupting the quiet of the moment. 'I prefer to have my feet firmly on solid ground, thank you very much.'

Bonnie smiled, in spite of herself as she turned to face the figure approaching them from the staircase. 'I'd know that voice anywhere,' she said, and then, perhaps to Michael's surprise, she reached out and pulled the newcomer into a hug. 'Hello, Jess.'

The look on Jessica's face as she pulled away from her former tutor, Bonnie decided, was priceless. 'Professor, please.'

'Yes, I know that you don't answer to that name, but I'm not awfully fond of answering to "professor", either. How many times did I have to tell you back at Harvard? Call me _Bonnie_.'

'Fine, if that's the way we're going to play it,' Jessica said with practiced nonchalance. Then she looked at Michael. 'You two are late. You should've been here hours ago, we've all been having to convince the machine to let us carry out essential repairs without you to swing the ball in our favour.'

'Yeah I had a feeling you might,' Michael said. 'How is he?'

'Wondering where the hell you are,' Jessica said, tilting her head in the direction of the staircase. Michael started to move towards the metal steps leading down to the main lab, and then paused, casting Bonnie a look. KITT, Bonnie realised. He was trying to get to KITT.

She shook her head. 'It's alright, I'll... I'll be there in a second, I just...' she glanced around the room once more and Michael nodded, understanding and giving her arm a brief squeeze before descending the spiral staircase three steps at a time.

And for all that she had been eager to get here for hours, Bonnie now found herself wavering, cause between Jessica and the lab below them.

'Sorry we're late,' she said. 'We had a little incident involving the Chicago Police.'

'I was starting to wonder,' Jessica said, smiling. 'I mean Michael said he'd be back as soon as he picked you up... I was sure that the airport wasn't an entire six hours away from here. Are you alright?'

'Yes, considering. And now that I'm here,' she said, holding out her hands in display. 'Hit me with the bad news already. How many times had he died so far?'

Jessica gave her a momentary look, seemingly confused. 'Don't look at me like that,' Bonnie said, warningly. 'Jessica we worked together for two years. I know you. I know what that look means. No skipping around the point on two wheels; no showing off your technical proficiency... I don't need to know how many more big words you've learned since I saw you last, or just how quickly you can recalibrate a memory cell now. Just tell me what happened to the Knight Industries Two Thousand.'

Jessica seemed taken aback, perhaps even a little hurt, and Bonnie found herself biting her own tongue. 'I'm sorry, Jessica I didn't mean...' She let out a breath she hadn't realised she was holding. 'I need to be prepared for this. It's strange. There was a time when I would've rushed down there, shoved everyone out of my way and paused only to yell at Michael about what the heck he'd done to KITT this time, but... this place...' She trailed off, unable to explain it. Jessica's head tilted slightly, the way it did when she was thinking very hard.

'...Professor?'

'Bonnie.'

'Sorry. Bonnie. If I might ask... do you feel put out by all this?'

Bonnie didn't answer her; at least not directly. She leant against a railing gazing down into the lab below, wondering where KITT could possibly be amongst it all. She thought she could see pieces of sheared metal here and there being shifted around by mechanics, but it was impossible to tell whether they had once been attached to the Knight Industries Four Thousand. The thought of KITT lying in pieces down there was almost more than she could bear.

'A long time ago,' she said, 'Michael once compared me to... KITT's mother. He said it in jest, but it was practically true. The way I dealt with things and dealt with him... I was there right from the beginning. I as one of the first people KITT made contact with when he first came online in Washington... and I was always there after that, just like any mother would be. Right now, knowing that the situation is being dealt with, I almost feel like...'

'...Like an interfering parent, getting in the doctor's way?' Jessica suggested. Bonnie felt slightly surprised that Jessica, of all people, had come up with such a very human metaphor. 'If it makes you feel any better, Bonnie, I was the one who called you. You're very much wanted here. Very much necessary, if I might say so. You were the KIFT'S original technician, there's nothing you don't know about it. Or didn't, at least, when you worked here.'

Bonnie couldn't argue with that. She tightened her grip on the metal railing. 'I need to know... I need to know what I'm going to see down there. I need to know what happened to my child, do you understand that?'

Jessica's mouth remained partly open, seemingly in confusion, but she nodded, and slowly her expression changed into a smile. 'We'll have time for playing catch-up later then.' She said, waving a hand in the direction of the lab.

Bonnie walked with her slowly in the direction of the spiral stairway, and Jessica spoke as she walked. Bonnie was reminded every step the woman took of the three years she had spent at Harvard. Jessica was constantly glancing at things she had probably seen a hundred times before, as if afraid to keep her gaze locked on any one thing for too long. And she talked quickly while moving. Fortunately, Bonnie was used to keeping up with people who assumed your brain processed information at the same speed theirs did.

'The KIFT arrived here about eighteen hours ago in pieces. We couldn't be sure what had happened exactly, only that whatever it was, it had ripped up systems both physical and internal. The state it was in, when it arrived...' she paused. 'You should probably prepare yourself.'

'I've been preparing myself for the last ten hours,' Bonnie said, with a humourless smile. 'What about the internal CPU? What damage had... the AI sustained?'

'There were some hairline fractures to internal components that I had to perform emergency repairs to as soon as the CPU arrived here,' Jessica said, seemingly being very careful with her wording. It was a temporary measure, but it did the job.'

Bonnie nodded, but did not feel so reassured when Jessica hesitated at her next question: 'Did you compensate for the resulting sensory deprivation?'

'At first.. .no, it was something I didn't take into account, Bonnie,' Jessica tried to explain herself. 'But when the machinery began to shut down, I realised there was something we weren't taking into account – namely that the Ai itself, the intelligence of the machine was... in shock.'

'That was when you called me...' Bonnie deduced. 'When I told you to contact Michael.'

Jessica nodded. 'As soon as he got here, we hooked up a textual transcriber and allowed him to "talk", so to speak, directly with the AI. It seemed to help. Within hours it was responding to us again, attempting to communicate, becoming aware of its situation...  
Meanwhile our technicians got on with separating the CPU's damaged components and repairing them individually. Right now the software is spread out over at least fifteen different work stations. His memory banks have sustained the worst damage, along with his sensory systems. It's almost as if the vehicle somehow came into contact with a high intensity weapon.'

'A weapon?' Bonnie frowned, struggling to think of any weapon which could have shredded KITT's systems so thoroughly. 'Such as a laser?'

'Laser isn't the word I'm looking for exactly, but its close, 'Jessica said, frowning as she leaned on the banister, pausing halfway down the staircase. 'Judging from the damage patterns, it was probably more like some kind of a sheet.'

'A sheet?'

'Yes... or a wave of high concentrated energy, moving at a high speed. Like a laser in some ways, certainly, but with a wider surface area. And fast. Very fast... immeasurable on any of the machine's sensors...' Jessica seemed to shiver slightly, which made Bonnie even more nervous. Jessica, she recalled, did not scare easily. 'Bonnie, whatever it was, it ripped through the Molecular Bonded Shell as if it wasn't there... and in the proceed, it seems to have scrambled countless databanks and cognitive systems. Like a laser and a virus all in one. Almost all of its perception sensors were disintegrated on contact, it's olfactory and auditory sensors were ripped to shreds... like something had burned them away... we spent a long time just getting the main computer back online, but we managed it.' She seemed proud of this fact, and no wonder, if the machine had been as severely damaged as it sounded.

'The CPU began responding to us cognitively about eight hours ago,' Jessica went on. 'It was Michael who got it... him, talking again. However by that point the emergency repairs I'd carried out on the main CPU were starting to break down. I needed to take the processor apart in order to perform a more thorough repair, but...'

'But?' Bonnie asked, unable to keep from sounding impatient. She was glancing around the lab now, searching for Michael amongst the mess of sheets and people. She There were one or two familiar faces glimpsing, surprised, in her direction, but Bonnie paid them no heed. The only face she wanted to see had a flickering red scanner and no eyes, nose or mouth to speak of.

'But... he wasn't too keen on that idea.' Jessica said.

Bonnie let this sink in for a moment, still glancing around the lab. Here she felt somewhat more at home than she had in the sterile corridors above. The activity of a laboratory, constant and urgent, was what she needed right now. It helped her keep her feet on the ground and not panic about the state she might be about to find her child in. '...He was afraid,' she said, certainly. And Jessica took another moment before answering.

'I...I can only assume that he was.'

'That bothers you,' Bonnie said. Truthfully, she had known it would. When one of Jessica's correspondence emails had mentioned that she would be taking a place at FLAG, Bonnie had known instantly that she wouldn't be prepared for KITT. She remember Jessica's blunt, direct control over memory boards and computer systems back at Harvard. Her pristinely printed exam papers and textbook formula... she ahd known from the start that the only thing at FLAG Jessica Matthews wouldn't be prepared for was the unpredictable nature of her main subject. Of KITT.

'Perhaps a little,' Jessica shrugged. 'But I got by, once we settled a few... disagreements. Ms Elliot was a big help,' she added.

'Elliot?' the name run a bell. 'As in Claire Elliot? She still works here?'

'Are you kidding? I've only known her twenty four hours and she's trying to put me out of a job,' Jessica said. 'She must have Mister Knight's touch. What I couldn't convince it to agree to, it settled with her within half an hour. We just completed the CPU main repairs a while ago. It's still a bit touch-and-go, but it's looking up. The things we couldn't fix we'll leave to you... I have a feeling you'll... handle him better than I did.' Jessica seemed to be slightly relieved by the thought that bonnie would most likely want to take over jobs involving the main CPU, the centre of KITT's identity.

Bonnie smiled. She should have known that FLAG'S technicians would be as proficient as they ever were. 'And what about the things you could repair? Your first day here and you're having to repair the main CPU systems?'

'A neurosurgeon couldn't have done a cleaner job,' Jessica smiled. And then the smile faded. 'I'm sorry, did that count as bragging about my technical proficiency?'

'No,' Bonnie half laughed, unable to keep the relief out of her tone. 'No, that'll do just fine, Jess.' Just let me get to him, Jessica, Bonnie said, an ironic smile on her face, 'That's all I need right now.'

'I understand, Pro... Bonnie, come with me. And Bonnie?' she hesitated. 'Things... they'll be fine, I promise you. Whatever state it's in, it's nothing we can't fix.'

Bonnie nodded, following Jessica through the maze of white sheeting and technical screens, into the hub of the lab, believing every word the woman said to her, but crossing her fingers anyway.

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'...KITT?'

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'KITT? Can you hear me?'

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'You... you are the Knight Industries Two Thousand...'

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'KITT. You are the Knight Industries Two Thousand... Who are you?'

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_'...Bonnie?'

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_


	12. File: Ten

**Finally. Apologies for taking so long if by some strange chance you were waiting for this. This chapter took some real putting together. I wanted to include another section but that will have to be saved and be used in another chapter as this one was losing its coherency the longer it went on. Plus the longer I take writing this the less time I have for the actual important stuff, like Uni. Writing psychological-stuff is _hard_...**

**Standard disclaimers apply. Reviews and concrit are appreciated. **

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KITT knew that the technicians were still working on his memory banks, because information kept coming back to him in vague drips and drabs. Information which didn't make much sense in their current state, but probably would once his systems were put back together entirely. Information which he hadn't realised was missing until the instant at which it reappeared.

It was only simple things, at first. Such as his basic encyclopaedia, then several of his memory files and some more of his stored Human Databases, then his criminal databanks, and then his driver recognition software (causing a sensation which seemed unnaturally painful, what with the driver's obvious absence).

Bonnie had little to do with these changes. In fact, she wasn't doing much at all, but what she was doing – sitting, talking, smiling – was more than enough for KITT. It was... strange for him, seeing her here like this after such a long time; hearing the slight aging of her voice and the warmth in her tone. He wondered what she might look like once his sensors were repaired. Doubtless like someone whom Michael would still call beautiful.

KITT had... missed her.

It was... difficult for KITT bat first, to separate his memories from his data. They would congeal and blend in places, his memory banks shifting back and forth. There were a few brief moments during which he thought he might be the personification of Zeno's Paradox. And then a ghost. And then a god. That particular thought, however, was obviously ridiculous. There was absolutely no way he could be a god of any type.

It was this realisation was what allowed KITT to catch onto the fact that his memory banks and his information banks had somehow gotten... confused with each other. That the information was merging together and creating a strange mishmash of knowledge and experience.

Still, the hand on his dash –the hand he could now _feel_ again, thank goodness– was as real and as easy to identify as it had ever been. Nobody could forget the touch of Bonnie Barstow on their circuits.

They must have restored some of his tactile sensory systems while he was deactivated for his CPU repairs. Of course, bearing in mind that KITT's CPU was currently connected to his "body" (or what remained of it, anyway) by nothing more than a few thin fibre optic cables and plugs, it was a tentative reconnection at best. The process of his total restoration was going to be, as Michael might put it, a very hard slog.

But he would be restored. Rebuilt. In time. Just as Shawn had said he would be.

Shawn. She had not appeared to him again, and this only further convinced KITT that it could only have been a manifestation. An illusion, crafted by a part of his mind he wasn't even aware he had. The deep, dark absence of the chip remained firm and unyielding, like an unyielding error. KITT wasn't certain whether or not he should be relieved.

And then something happened. Something which seemed to burst out from within the sullen gap left by the chip. It wasn't a memory. Nothing like a memory. But nothing like a fragment of encyclopaedic data, either. It seemed to creep through his systems, constantly alerting him to its presence, even though it couldn't possibly be there. KITT wasn't even sure what it was. It had the same consistency as Not-Shawn's had had on his hood, luring and terrifying in the same breath. Confusing.

A glimmer, a glare, a slice of light bursting through his systems, like a glitch upon his visual sensors.

KITT had no idea what it was, but he knew he didn't like it

* * *

'...So I was on this plane for two whole hours, and KITT, I swear to you, he just didn't stop talking _once_, the entire trip. About his home, his wife, his business, his son... children...'

Bonnie carefully tweaked an exposed wire, trying to deduce whether replacing it right now would interfere with the work of the other technicians. It seemed to be a part of his visual network and she was sure he'd appreciate getting some vision back, but it felt kind of like patching a pinhole leak when the ship was sinking from another massive hole somewhere else. The remains of the Knight Industries Two Thousand were mottled with strange textures and scorched bare of colour, so it was impossible to be certain, but Bonnie had the feeling he was no longer black.

'...Actually, it made me feel a lot better. It was nice to have someone nattering on to take my mind off the fact that I was fifteen thousand feet up in the air. You would've been proud of me. Of course, not that things calmed down when we got to the airport... when are they ever calm with us, huh? Still, otherwise...'

He rarely answered her comments, bar the occasional agreement and dismissal. He seemed distracted and not quite there, but then again he had just undergone serious repairs and was being kept of very low power for technical reasons only. She supposed it was the AI equivalent of still being doped up with morphine after an operation –In the world, but barely aware of it.

_'Otherwise...?'_ KITT gave a rare response.

'Otherwise,' Bonnie smiled; I think he would've driven me crazy within the first ten minutes. I might've even grabbed a parachute...'

_'Bonnie, seriously...'_ He didn't _sound_ that serious, however, which Bonnie took to be a good thing.

'Well, alright so maybe I'm exaggerating a little. He was a nice enough person,' she raised an eyebrow, slyly. 'Although, you should've heard what he said about Michael after we landed...'

Bonnie sat in what had once been his driver's seat, looking over the vestiges of the vehicle, and trying to decipher which panel was which. Though given that she hadn't known what the "new" KITT looked like before, it was especially hard to tell now.

That said, at least she was fitting in. It didn't honestly matter that most people here hadn't been around long enough to remember the days when Bonnie was literally running the show, but that didn't matter seeing as the name "Professor B. Barstow" was, by now, a renowned one in the world of cybernetics. As soon as they realised exactly who she was, any attempts at getting her to stay out of their way stopped. Now the technical team was looking to her for instruction.

For the most part, Bonnie sent them to

_'Why did you come here?'_

'Why?' Bonnie frowned, pausing in her work for a moment, 'Why do you think I came?'

_'...I assumed they called you to assist with my repairs.'_

He sounded all but normal, excepting for a slight waver in his tone and the occasionally crackle of static.

'Yeah, well, unfortunately KITT I'm not actually even all that certain just what half of these new systems of yours do. I'm still working it out. Welcome to the twenty first century huh?'

_'Yes... it would seem that technology has gotten away from us both. It's been a long time, Bonnie.' _

'Yes, it has,' Bonnie said, gently, opting to leave the wire she had been playing with alone for now. He had her voice. That should be enough. 'Anyway, what's this? No comments about one of those poets who wrote about the fleeting nature of time? No Michael Jackson references?'

_'Oh, Michael Jackson is out of the loop, Bonnie,'_ KITT responded. _'Very nineties. And you wouldn't believe what happened to his _face_ in the meantime.' _

Bonnie smiled. 'Oh, I think I might. I watch a lot of news these days. Mostly looking out for you, actually, wondering what you're getting up to.'

_'You shouldn't, I find it terribly depressing. The idea that_ "one man can make a difference" _can be a staggeringly difficult maxim to live up to, from time to time. Speaking of which, where is Michael?' _  
'He's trying to track down your boss, right now,' Bonnie said.

_'Mister Maddock?' _

'Yeah. Apparently he's vanished from the premises for no reason whatsoever. According to Jessica, that's not like him.'

_'No, it isn't,'_ KITT sounded confused _'I believe the saying "chained to his desk" would be the best way to describe Mister Maddock even at the best of times. That he should have disappeared seems is very... out of character.' _

'I'm sure we'll find him, KITT. He honestly can't have gone far... You know, I missed you.' She was changing the subject, she knew, but somehow she felt it probably wouldn't be good for KITT to dwell on their current situation. The less he was aware about just how much his destruction had thrown Knight Industries into chaos, the better.

_'You already mentioned that less than five minutes ago, Bonnie. I hope I responded appropriately.' _

Joking. He was joking with her. Which was... nice. And just a little strange, given the state he was in right now, and considering the state which Jessica said he had been in a few hours earlier. She gave the dashboard a tap, mostly for herself, seeing as his sensors were still damaged enough that he might not even perceive her touch. 'Yes, you over intelligent numbskull, you responded aptly. We were worried for a while, you know? When I saw you...' She paused, biting down on her tongue. 'I wasn't sure that you'd be getting out of this one... I guess I should've known better, huh?'

_'Perhaps so. My death isn't what Shawn would have wanted for me... There's a gap,'_ he said, eventually. _'An empty space where the chip was.'_

'No KITT,' Bonnie said, with a faint, sad smile. 'That's just the place where Shawn used to be. Nothing to do with the chip.'

_'You misunderstand me a little. The chip bound us in ways that are difficult to explain to other people.'_ KITT said, by way of explanation.

'Try anyway,' Bonnie answered.

KITT paused for a moment, before responding. _'...He did. It was not a welcome phenomenon at first -neither of us could seem to turn it off - but... when we got used to it, we discovered we wouldn't have it any other way. Regardless of whether it was intended to work in the way it did, the chip was... virtually a tactile experience. Shawn's presence within me, and mine within her. Did you know that we had no need for communicators?'_

'No, I didn't.' Bonnie frowned, curiously.

_'The connection is... _was _mental as well as physical. And now that presence is gone. To be without it now... feels similar to losing Michael all over again. In some ways, worse. Michael can always return. Shawn cannot.'_

'Oh, KITT,' Bonnie sighed, realising that there was really nothing she could say about this.

_'It's alright, Bonnie,'_ KITT said, reassuringly. _'The presence itself is still very much there. I'm not sure how or why, and it doesn't fill the voice left by the chip, but...'_

'Of course. She'll always be there,' Bonnie said, and she had to swallow at that point, remembering the reassuring arm of an old man around her shoulders and the smooth timbre of a southern British accent... 'Always.'

She relaxed slightly in her seat, the silence between them speaking volumes.

And then there was a shudder. A tremble that seemed to hang over them far longer than was natural. Bonnie shivered, as if the static were passing right across her body. Her jaw ached. '...KITT, what was that?'

_'I would presume that it was static, Bonnie,'_ KITT responded in a slightly clipped tone _'I _am _something of a hotwire of bad connections and bad energy flows at the moment...' _

No, KITT... it's not static.'

Bonnie knew what static felt like. She knew that at least that couldn't possibly be any different to how it had been ten years ago. 'That was an energy burst of some kind; coming from your central processor... do you know what it was?'

_'I'm afraid I don't,'_ KITT added, more quietly this time, and with something of a crackle to his voice. _'Bonnie... where's Michael?'_

'Michael? He's out looking for Maddock, like I said...' Bonnie frowned, tapping at the exposed wire on KITT's systems distractedly. She couldn't think of anything which might have caused such a fluctuation.

_'That is what you said,'_ KITT said, seeming concerned. _'But I have a feeling that it isn't true.' _

'What do you mean?' Bonnie felt the muscles in her spine tensing in an all-too familiar pattern of anxiety. 'KITT, I wouldn't lie.'

_'I apologise. I'm not saying you would lie, Bonnie, but Michael is not in the place he assured you he would be. Michael isn't looking for Mister Maddock,'_ KITT said, speaking slowly and carefully, as if afraid he might crash his systems if he tried to explain too quickly.

'Then where did he go?' Bonnie frowned.

There was a hesitation. Then: _'...He's gone to the Baldtson Laboratory in the Mistletoe Valley.' _KITT said, terror punctuating his certainly.

'Baldtson?' Bonnie frowned, and then that frown became a stare as realisation dawned on her. 'He's... he's not out looking for whatever did this to you, is he? He's not looking for the thing that...' Killed Shawn, Bonnie didn't say, for she knew what affect those words might have on him.

_'I don't know...'_ KITT seemed confused. _'Why else would he be there?' _

'Wait I... KITT how do you know this anyway?' Bonnie asked. 'How do you know where he's gone? Your predictive systems are still offline, you can't have anticipated—'

_'I don't know.'_ KITT said, in a tone that suggested asking further questions probably wouldn't get them anywhere. 'Bonnie, I'm stuck here. I can't...'

'Alright...' took a deep breath, realising how little this made sense. Earlier, Michael had patted her on the shoulder, winked at Jessica (much to the third-tier technician's chagrin) and given KITT a smile and a comment, before turning and striding out of the room with far more energy than he had shown in the last few hours. Bonnie couldn't understand where he might have gone that wasn't in search of Maddock... 'Alright just... just tell me where you think he is. Tell me where the valley is, I'll go there, I'll...'

_'No.'_ KITT spoke too quickly, too sharply, for him to be anything other than terrified. Despite all the changes to his systems, his voice remained the same. The shorter and sharper his words were, the worse the situation could become, and remembering this, Bonnie tensed up. _'You shouldn't go there. And neither should Michael, he has to get away, he... I think you should leave.' _

'...What?' This was just getting stranger by the minute. And given how bizarre things had been in the first place, that was really saying something.

_'Leave,'_ KITT repeated, his tone serious and concerned. _'Go back to Massachusetts, Bonnie, get away from FLAG as soon as you can. I'm serious.'_

'...KITT, I don't understand.' Bonnie glanced at one of the mobile devices perched on the remains of KIT's dashboard, but nothing in his main systems appeared anymore amiss than they had been before.

_'It isn't safe. You shouldn't be here. And neither should Michael. You're both going to get into trouble.'_

'What _trouble?_ KITT, what're you talking about?' Bonnie asked, frustration growing. 'What's the matter with you?'

_'No, Bonnie, it isn't _me_, it's_ Michael. _I don't know what's causing it, all I know is that we went there and now Shawn's gone. You might...'_

'KITT?'

There was a pause. No answer. KITT stubbornly refused to finish the sentence he had started. Bonnie gripped the steering wheel tighter. 'KITT, I might _what_?'

Silence. Then, into the silence, a single word, spoken through broken vocal modulators: _'...Two.' _

Bonnie couldn't think what that word meant, and she didn't waste much time trying to decipher it. She carefully scrolled through the messages on KITT's only working visual system and, finding nothing abnormal, clambered out of the driver's seat.

'KITT... I'm going to bring Jessica over here and go and find Michael.'

_'You shouldn't,'_ KITT repeated anxiously, and in response, Bonnie ran a hand across the remains of his crumpled outer shell.

'I promise, it'll be alright. But I have to go, KITT. If there's something out there, I can't just leave him.'

KITT was silent for a long moment before saying. _'...I understand. But Bonnie, please be careful.'_

'I will,' Bonnie smiled faintly, though she had no idea whatsoever what she could be being careful _about_.

She left the room quickly. 

* * *

_'Shawn?'_

'Yes, KITT?'

There it is again. The familiar weight and familiar tone, as clear as crystal diaodes.

_'I thought as much... you are there, aren't you?'_

I suppose I am, yes,' Shawn touched his monitor. 'And so are you... why is that?'

_'I'm sorry?'_

'You should be out there helping Bonnie and Michael find out what did this to you.' Shawn said. 'Why are you here?'

_'...I think the answer to that is fairly obvious. I'm incapable of movement.'_

'Yes, right now you seem pretty much beyond doing barrel rolls and one-eighty turns, huh?'

_'Shawn,_ really_.'_

Shawn laughed. It was a quiet laugh, and not truly reminiscent of her, but... it felt like her, nonetheless. 'I'm sorry, KITT. You're right, of course. You can't go anywhere right now. But there are ways in which you can be repaired.'

_'I don't understand... Why are you here, Shawn?'_ KITT asked again._ 'Something is very strong...'_

'I asked you a question earlier, remember?' Shawn replied. 'I asked you what you believed was wrong with you. Tell me –can you answer it yet?'

_'I'm... I'm afraid I still don't know what you mean,'_ KITT said hesitantly. _'...I have been damaged.' _

'But you don't know how or why,' Shawn finished. 'Or at least, you aren't aware of what you _do_ know. It's very important that you discover the answer to my question, KITT.'

_'...I don't know how. What do _you_ think happened?'_ Wonderful, now he was communicating and asking questions of the little voice in his head. KITT was fairly sure that no human being would consider this healthy behaviour.

'If I know the answer to that, then I can't tell you anyway, KITT,' Shawn-not-Shawn's voice continued. 'It's something you have to discover yourself. That's the only way that you'll able to avoid a repeat of the last failure.'

_'The last failure? What failure are you talking about? Do you mean the case we were following before the accident? Before you...' _his voice trailed off in confusion as he suddenly realised what it was he had forgotten. _'Shawn, you're dead... you should not be here, telling me these things.' _

'Well, you're right about that,' Shawn smiled. 'I shouldn't be here. But I couldn't very well leave you alone now, could I? KITT...' she leant forwards towards his dash. 'Our last case is not the main concern here. We have, as they say, much bigger fish to fry. You must remember why we went to Mistletoe Valley. There's something waiting for us there. You have to find it again.'

_'But surely that isn't wise. If whatever did this to me... to _you_, is at Baldtson... how can I return there? How can _anyone _return there?'_

'Because it's necessary,' Shawn said. 'Even if it might be painful. You know what to do, KITT. Remember.'

_'I'm not sure that I can.' _

'Nothing is stronger than a human being's willpower,' Shawn said. 'Or at least, nothing in this world is.'

_'But I'm not human.'_

Shawn smiled faintly, touching his dashboard once again. 'No, you're not. But you're certainly something.'

This was all the explanation that she would give and a moment later, her presence had once again vanished.

* * *


	13. File: Eleven

**It's kinda short, and _really_ needs beta-ing but I am kinda happy with it. Hope it's enjoyable.  
**

* * *

Initial.  
File: Eleven.

She wasn't going to have a conversation with it that was for sure.

Jessica Matthews had been suspicious about this whole affair right from the beginning, but this was neither the time nor the place for indulging her scientific curiosities concerning artificial intelligences. She stood at the bottom of the rampart and gazed upwards into the lights which made it possible for the mechanics who were currently working on the battered Knight Industries Four Thousand to see what they were doing. It was eight pm by now, and the lightning all around them was entirely artificial.

In fact, it was not truthfully the car which Jessica was staring at. Bit by bit, the remains of the car's hood, casing, and blood-spattered seats were being removed, leaving behind onto the complex, technical computer that was the Knight Industries Four Thousand's Microprocessor. In other words, KITT. This was the thing Jessica kept her eyes fixed upon.

Or rather, she kept her eyes fixed upon this, and the middle aged woman sitting in front of it, seemingly talking to herself. In realty she was communicating with the artificial intelligence of the Knight Industries Four Thousand, just as Michael Knight had been for several hours before her arrival.

Jessica had no idea where Michael was now. or bonnie, for that matter. They had both rushed out earlier in something of a hurry. The odds were that Michael had opted to try and track down the Company Director and that Bonnie had gone after him, and since neither of them were really officially connected to the company there wasn't really much that Jessica could do about it. She wasn't even sure of either of them actually had mobile phones, much less their numbers.

So instead she stayed there, watching KITT and trying to ignore the buzzing tickle in the back of her brain. Damn migraines. They always come on after stressful moments such as this, and she would have to go and leave her prescription painkillers at home today...

She just couldn't quite get out of her mind the way in which everyone behaved around that... computer. They could've just ripped him away from the car and did the repairs as they wanted to, but they hadn't. He hadn't given them permission to do so. After all, don't self-aware and conscious individuals have the full right to refuse medical treatment for themselves for whatever reason?

Jessica shifted uncomfortably in the awareness that she had come around so easily to an understanding of KITT's... sentience. Bonnie had mentioned it to her, of course. The machines and technology that she had worked on back in FLAG, but never ocne had she mentioned just how... complicated her job could be.

As she watched, Claire stood up from the seat of the vehicle and gave what remained of the hood a friendly pat. She smiled at Jessica as she passed by and returned to her work station, but Jessica was too distracted to return the gesture.

What the heck. Making up her mind, she placed down her clipboard and began to walk up the rampart in the direction of the shattered vehicle.

She sat down carefully in the driver's seat – now the only one left in the car – as if it might explode under the pressure of her weight, and there was a long instance of silence before the Knight Industries Four Thousand responded to her presence.

_'Miss Matthews, I presume,'_ it said.

Jessica took a deep breath. 'Yeah, it's me again... Hello KITT.'

* * *

The wind was just strong enough to block out some of his hearing up here, but Michael could see across the expanse of Mistletoe Valley easily enough, even in the dim light.

They were right –it definitely did look like it had, at one time, been a nature reserve. No longer, though. Now the entire beautiful landscape was dominated by a sterile looking series of grey buildings and roads – just like any other industrial estate might look, Michael though, except for the fact that it was located in what had probably once been a natural hotspot.

This was it. Where the accident happened.

Michael stood of the cliff face looking down onto the buildings below. There was no police presence or yellow tape. No sign that anything had ever happened here, bar a few deep skid marks in the road leading up to the edge of the road. No prizes for guessing that what had caused them.

And beyond that there was the woodland –a brief stretch of it, rough and tangled, before fading out into car parks and buildings. It was impossible to tell exactly what was going on in there from here, but the files they had on Baldtson had said something about it being a scientific facility that branched out into three divisions –technical, micro computation studies, and medicine. In the last fifteen years, the files said, Baldtson had been responsible for developing advanced iron Lung technology for people with incurable lung diseases, produced one of the bases for the RNA reading system currently in use by the police, and aided in the discovery of two further elements of the periodic table. Their technical department, Michael had also discovered, were the creators of the Louisiana Cellracer, a world-record breaking prototype vehicle which had crushed, killing its driver, only a few days earlier.

He still had no explanations for what had happened at the airport...Michael shook his head. It wasn't the same thing, but his brain kept drawing on it, looking for connections that weren't there.

Figured that they would have gotten themselves involved in something bigger than they anticipated. These kind of things always seemed to happen in the most unlikely places.

Michael knelt down, ran his fingers through the dust at the side of the road and saw it glitter under his fingertips. Like fragments of metal in the dirt. They shouldn't have been there, but it wasn't like there was a forensics team around to check up on it. A lot of evidence could have blown away by now.

Michael grimaced, frustrated. Thinking about the , and the way his back hurts that little bit when he stands up again clutching the metallic fragments in his fingers. Still older than he looks. Still feeling it. Too old for any of this...

But Shawn wasn't old, and she had paid the price for youth and probably for her brashness. Something had killed her out here, in this place that looked more peaceful than it probably was. And Michael was starting to put the pieces together about exactly why.

They were vague and kind of desperate connections, though. Like the Baldtson laboratory where Shawn and KITT had looked death in the face. Like the man who crashed through the wall of the airport and died still looking into Michael's eyes. Like Maddock's disappearance.

Connections. They were there, and he'd find out what they meant one way or another.

'Michael?'

Bonnie. He hadn't heard her car pulling up, but he heard her voice calling through the wind and reached out a hand to take her arm as she approached, steadying both of them at the edge of the cliffs. Bonnie hung on. 'I thought I'd find you out here... or KITT did, rather. Is this it?'

'Yeah,' Michael swallowed. 'This is it alright. You can see the skid marks where they went over. You can tell...' he paused, shaking his head, still staring down at the laboratory.

'KITT said I should get away.' Bonnie said, faintly.

'From the Lab?'

'From the whole State, Michael,' Bonnie sighed, wrapping her arms tightly around herself. 'He wanted me to go back to Massachusetts. He said it's not safe here. He's scared of something. What I'm not sure, but I have no doubt whatsoever that it's connected to the thing which destroyed Shawn... and the thing which hurt him. He's strange now...'

'Sure he's scared, he lost Shawn, he probably sees explosions around every corner, Bonnie, and thinks you might be in one of them, even though they don't exist.'

Bonnie clutched him a little tighter, familiar and warning as well as comforting. 'Michael, I'm not sure you understand.'

'I think I understand about near-death experiences.'

'Maybe not in computers,' Bonnie said, faintly. And then, as if to change the subject, she added. 'What do you mean to do out here, Michael?'

'Find answers,' Michael said. 'I'm sure they're out here. Nobody else is so much as looking into it. Someone has to work it out or else Shawn is going to be buried without anyone knowing why. Not even KITT.'

Bonnie held on a little tighter. 'And Maddock?'

'We'll find him. I've got a feeling he's a major part of this, Bonnie, but I'm not sure how just yet.

'It doesn't make any sense, Michael,' Bonnie muttered, still gazing out across the twilight sky, as if waiting for the constellations to give them answers.

'I know. But I don't need you to make sense of it yet, Bon. I sure haven't. I just need you to trust me.'

'I trust you. I'll even help you,' she smiled at him. 'I choose you, Mr Knight, over my entire level class back at Harvard university. Who _still_ don't know where I am, by the way. You should be flattered.'

Michael grinned at her. 'Then flattered I shall be.' 

* * *

_'It is strange, Jessica...'_

Jessica looks up from the console she was pretending to repair, but didn't need to ask him what. He usually didn't break a train of speech once he had started one. She had learned that much in the last twenty minutes. _'You mentioned that forensics had wished to go over me as soon as possible, to find as much evidence as they could... Yet you still held them back in order to perform the emergency repairs. That hesitation could have cost us valuable evidence.' _

So much for not having a conversation with it. Maybe KITT just had this effect on the people he interacted with.

'That was possible, but unlikely. Look at it this way, KITT, what I risked losing back there was either you, or the data you contained. I wasn't exactly sure how important you were, I'll admit, but I know that data can be recovered. Think of it as emergency surgery. I had to take some desperate measures to ensure your program and sentience code wasn't permanently lost... why focus on the why?'

_'Well if it was you, wouldn't_ you _want to know what someone was doing with your body while you were incapacitated?'_

Jessica said nothing to that.

_am very much alive, Jessica, though I'm afraid I can't tell you precisely what that means. I find it strange that you pretended to ignore that fact.' _

'You _are_ perceptive, huh? Because repairing machines is what I do, KITT,' Jessica said, after only a moment's hesitation. 'I'm a mechanic, not a detective. It's my job to fix the problem, not to work out the why's and how's, unless they could affect my work.'

_'And so you chose to repair the damaged machine, as opposed to regaining the data within me.'_'

'Of course. That's my duty. Who programmed you to be so damned inquisitive anyway?'

_'Personally I blame our Professor Barstow.'_

Jessica shuffled in her chair, focussing just a little too intently on the motherboard she was repairing. 'Professor Barstow... never warned me about this. About you.'

_'I could tell. Your relationship with Bonnie is rather like mine with Michael.'_

Which means?

_'It's extremely complicated. '_

Jessica smiled, then wiped the smile hurriedly from her face. 'To answer your earlier question, KITT... you were as important to the upcoming investigation as any scientist's experiments and examinations of your upholstery would be. Maybe more so. Forensic evidence is important but you... her face twitched into a half smile. You're the best piece of evidence we could possibly hope to have as to what chappened to Shaw. You were there. You saw it happening.'

KITT was quiet for as moment. _'I see. So you see me, then, as a mechanism which could provide vital clues about what happened to my...'_ He clearly didn't mean to hesitate, but his vocal modulator seemed to seize up anyway _'...Driver.' _

'Basically, yes. The answers are all right there, KITT. Inside of your processor. What was happening on the ridge at Mistletoe Valley... Why you were there in the first place. I have a feeling that you can lead us to what killed Shawn far more sufficiently than any blood or explosive analysis could.'

A pause, several seconds long. _'I'm not sure I can do that...'_

'Of course you can do it,' Jessica said, flippantly. 'Not at this exact moment sure, but you're still a machine and it's not like you were programmed with the ability to forget. All of the shielding can be broken through one way or another, I promise.'

_'But what if I wasn't aware of what happened to us in the first place, Jessica? What if Shawn... kept such knowledge from me?'_

'You think Shawn would've lied to you? Hidden the true nature of the mission from you?' Jessica frowned. 'Could she even do that?'

_'No. Well, yes... Actually I'm not certain, but...'_ He trailed off.

'Well, I'll say one thing: you're a lot less decisive than the machines I worked on back at Harvard,' Jessica sighed. 'Even if you weren't aware of the exact nature of the mission, your presence there could still provide us with a lot of circumstantial evidence. You're the words most advanced piece of machinery. You were made for situations just like this and I've no doubt that you still have the records of what happened out there inside of you somewhere. It's just a question of putting the pieces together in your mind and finding our answers. '

_'Jessica...' _

Jessica paused and looked at him. 'What is it?'

_'You're... you are putting considerable effort into helping Michael find out what happened to Shawn, and myself...'_ KITT went on, pausing seemingly nervously in his speech. Except of course computers, even sentient ones, couldn't possibly be nervous, could they? _'I don't know if you're aware of it, but... in spite of our differences, I am grateful for your assistance.'_

'Um. You're... welcome?' Jessica guessed that was the correct response. KITT's vocal simulator seemed to flicker ever so slightly. A chill of static raced up her spine.

_'If there is some way I might repay it...'_ KITT said.

'You don't... have to do that,' Jessica muttered, biting her lip, feeling awkwardness creeping up on her again. 'Seriously.'

_'But I do, Miss Matthews. I owe you all, as I owe every technician who had ever fought to keep me alive. You are all working hard on my repairs right now, am I correct?' _

Jessica gazed curiously at the vocal modulator before her, wondering what KITT could possibly mean. 'Yes?'

_'Then perhaps I can assist you,'_ KITT said.

Jessica tensed up, confused. Was it just her imagination... or was the crack in KITT's main screen suddenly decreasing in size? '...KITT? What do you mean?'

_'I mean precisely what I say, Jessica,'_ KITT said, in a tone of voice which suggested he had many answers to questions which Jessica had not even thought to ask yet. 'I can help you.'

Jessica opened her mouth to respond, but her words caught in her throat when she glanced once more at KITT's main monitor.

The deep crack through the screen had vanished completely, and as Jessica shifted her fingers, she could feel the metallic surface of the burned out car beginning to quiver and shift under her fingertips.

Just when she had thought things couldn't possibly get any more bizarre.

* * *

**RUN://dos:k.i.t.t.function4.5  
INDUSTRIES.  
Reinitiate://///  
Upload...  
Restart "One Man" file...  
Initiate epair Sequence: MOL332  
Begin.**

* * *


	14. File: Twelve

**Yegods it's been such a long time. Many apologies for the delay. I honestly have no excuse for this. Um. Sorry?**

* * *

Initial.  
File Twelve.

**THE FOUNDATION FOR LAW AND GOVERNMENT  
TWELVE YEARS AGO.**

At first, Bonnie had absolutely no idea why the images on the monitor she was watching were playing in black and white.

KITT's visual screens and sensors consisted of six full colour top of the line security cameras: the only way the images could be coming up in monochrome would be if KITT were causing it deliberately, or if somebody had adjusted his channels to the Sepia setting. Bonnie couldn't see any reason why KITT would be doing that. At least, not at first.

However, as the day dragged on, and applicant after applicant got behind KITT's wheel to run the test course as a potential replacement for his current (fired) driver, Bonnie had begun to notice a pattern.

'Sepia again, Devon.'

'Yes, I can see... Oh dear.'

The pattern was as followed: If the images of events taking place inside of KITT came up in full colour with no signs of editing then it meant that the current applicant was doing okay and there was no reason to worry. If the images came up in black and white then KITT was less than happy with the way things were going but was prepared to tolerate them for a while longer, and if the screens came in with sepia tones, then KITT thought his current "driver" was nothing short of ridiculous and was preparing to throw him skywards via the ejector seat.

So far, only one of the screens had shown events in full colour, most had come up in black and white. This was only the third to appear in Sepia.

Now, watching the day's recordings in the Head Office that evening, Bonnie winced and Devon... coughed.

'Well then. I presume this means we can cross "Chuck" off the list of ah... applicants,' Devon said calmly. 'I believe that brings the grand total of dismissed prospective replacements to twenty four.'

'Maybe he's just... having some adjustment issues,' Bonnie suggested uneasily.

'Bonnie, so much as I hate to disagree with your expertise I don't think KITT throwing people out of his roof is a sign of adjustment issues so much as it is a sign of adolescent piqué.'

Bonnie rubbed the back of her head. Damn migraines. 'Okay, fine, you may have a point there. Damn it... He's not happy at all, is he?'

'How do you mean?'

'I mean that KITT doesn't want any other driver, Devon.'

'There is no technological reason for that,' Devon says, evenly. 'Nothing in his programming.'

'Except for the fact that they bonded,' Bonnie adds. 'They're friends. Wilton never planned for that, did he, Devon?'

Bonnie still didn't understand that. Wilton Knight had helped to create a highly complicated artificial intelligence, capable of growing and adapting faster than any living being, of moulding to his driver like clay. He had designed a creature that could think and act for itself, and yet somehow, he hadn't thought for one moment about what this incredible creation could mean. 'KITT's making conscious choices which have little or nothing to do with what he was programmed to think and feel. Not that he hasn't been doing that all along...' Despite what some people wanted to think, she thought irritably, and Devon, reading her expression, frowned in agreement.

'...But he has never overrode his programming for the sake of a personal choice before. It doesn't work that way. Frankly, Bonnie, if you don't know what's going on then I certainly don't.'

Of course, Bonnie thought, if anyone could understand what was going on inside of KITT's "head", it would be her. She'd known him since the moment he was born...

Devon leaned back in his chair, looking older than Bonnie had ever seen him. As if he couldn't decide between excitement, and dismay. 'Well... I'm not sure Wilton planned for this.'

Bonnie winced again at the image of another driver being thrown from the vehicle. She took note of the fact that KITT had clearly staged this event to take place somewhere with a nice soft landing. A nice, soft, extremely smelly landing in an oversized garbage can. Well, in KITT's defence, that guy had been the biggest pain-in-the-rear-end (or in KITT's case, pain-in-the-exhaust) she'd ever encountered in all her time with the Foundation, and he had been making some rather suggestive comments about Devon's competence as a mission director. But while she'd never personally had the experience of being flung skywards by KITT's ejector seat, she had already seen it happening enough times in the past to know that the landing was never comfortable.

They watched the figure from the car struggling with black bin liners for a few moments longer (KITT reinforcing his point, Bonnie realised). Then, with what Bonnie thought was more than a little aplomb, KITT flickered off the camera. The screen went black.

Wonderful. Bonnie rested her chin in her hands and sighed. At this rate, there was no way in a thousand years they would ever get anybody except for Michael into KITT's driver's seat.

**

* * *

**

* * *

**PRESENT DAY, PRESENT TIME. **

Bonnie and Michael returned to the Foundation at Jessica's request, when she informed them that a very strange event had taken place in the repair bay.

And by "strange event" she meant "miracle". Though since Jessica Mathews never dealt in flimflam and melodramatic superstition, she would be loathe to use such a word. Nonetheless, Michael couldn't honestly think of any other explanation for the scene he was now looking at.

The mechanics and other assorted members of FLAG stood around in a confused huddle, muttering to one another in bewilderment. A few people had wandered over from other departments just to see what all the fuss was about. They had gathered around the central podium where the remains of KITT's chassis were lying (or rather, where they had been lying), and were staring at the Knight Industries Two Thousand in confusion and alarm. Although it was quite a different confusion and alarm to the one they'd been experiencing several hours earlier, when KITT's body was returned to them in a mess of tattered pieces, stinking of scorched leather and blood stains.

There was no smell of burned leather now. No blood stains, either.

As Bonnie and Michael pushed through the crowd, something glistened, like an old fashioned camera flash brushing against glass. The glisten came from the podium, and when Michael looked up, he saw... KITT.

At least he was fairly sure it was KITT. It looked like KITT, that same living, sentient mind wrapped up in a steel and alloy body. The Knight Industries sat before them, looking almost as good as new. All that was missing was a sleek coat of paint and a molecular bonded shell. He looked repaired, completed... almost perfect, in fact.

According to Jessica, these repairs had all taken place within barely thirty five minutes. And not a single Technician had been involved with the process. KITT had done it all himself.

Bonnie wasted no time in racing up the podium to where KITT sat, seeming unsure whether to smile or frown. Michael looked at Jessica. 'Uh... Jess, I assume you have an explanation for what I'm looking at here.'

'You assume incorrectly,' Jessica said, and though her tone was as sharp and blunt as ever, there was a note of nervousness creeping in around its edges. 'And it's Jessica, not Jess. We've been through this.'

'Fine, fine, whatever, but prioritise please,' Michael said dryly. 'What the heck am I looking at?'

'It's just like I told you on the phone,' Jessica shrugged. 'KITT did this himself... we weren't even touching him. He... he said something about thanking us,' Jessica frowned. 'For everything we'd done for him, whatever that meant. And then this happened. His chassis just started to knit back together, Michael, right in front of me. It's like he's reconfiguring, even recreating his entire body from the ground up.'

Michael gave this information a moment or two to sink in and waited for it to begin making some kind of sense. When this didn't happen, he said: 'But that's impossible.'

'Apparently it's not.' Jessica scowled. She'd had to deal with a lot of things outside of her current understanding of the world today. Jessica Matthews didn't like it when she didn't understand. Michael had realised that from the very first moment he met her.

He was starting to really dislike the sensation of confusion himself. 'You didn't activate a restoration program, did you? Could this be some sort of self repair mechanism?'

'Not unless you know of a piece of software which can remould metal alloy. Seriously, Michael, what kind of self repair mechanism do you know which could do something like this?'

'I don't know, maybe some pretty big ones that you don't know about,' Michael muttered. A part of his brain insisted that this was impossible, that the glistening, perfectly repaired car before him could not possibly be KITT. There was no way the extensive damage to his body could have been undone in so short a time period, and absolutely no way that KITT could have done it all himself, without the assistance of the rest of the department. Michael looked around at the nervous gathering of onlookers and signalled to Jessica. 'Look, get these guys out of here, alright? This is more attention than we need right now. I'm going to go talk to him.'

Jessica nodded curtly, and for some reason, Michael found himself taking a breath as he stepped up to the podium. Bonnie was talking twenty to the dozen and seeming less bewildered and scared than she was excited. She was touching buttons and examining wires, staring in astonishment as they moved and changed under her fingertips. She looked up at Michael and fell quiet , shifting over so he could take her place in the driver's seat, while she settled herself into the passenger's side.

Michael stopped in front of the "car" and stared at it for a moment. The surface of the raw metal seemed to shift and mould momentarily, before settling, the way clay would harden and lighten as it dried out. It was almost as if KITT were –and this was really ridiculous– brushing himself down.

Michael sat down in the driver's seat. For a moment he seemed lost for words. 'Uh... KITT?'

_'Yes Michael?'_ His voice was the same as always, at least, the same soft, Boston accent and ever-so-slightly clipped letters. KITT sounded... a little confused, actually. As if he knew what Michael was about to ask, but wasn't entirely certain how he was supposed to answer, or if he even wanted to. And if Michael didn't know better, he could've sworn KITT was feeling a little embarrassed by all of this attention.

'What the hell, KITT?'

There was a silent pause that seemed to last for eons.

_'...Your guess is as good as mine.'_ KITT says eventually. _'I don't think I know what's happening myself.'_

'Michael, look at this,' Bonnie murmured, indicating the console before her. Lights and shapes flickered across KITT's dashboard, as if he were testing his primary functions, checking everything was in order. At first glance, it almost seemed normal, but upon closer inspection everything changed. The patterns on the screen, the messages... they looked like nothing Michael had ever seen before. They certainly didn't look as if they belonged on the dash of the Knight Industries Four Thousand. The whole thing seemed so fluid and carefully laid out, that it was almost organic.

'Oh...kay, I'm not exactly an expert, but this doesn't seem to make any sense.' Michael looked at the vocal modulator which had always served as KITT's "mouth": it was in the same place, and still pulsing with the same, dim light it had always done. But there was something more fluid about those sharp red lines that indicated KITT's speech pattern. 'KITT you did this?'

There was a rustling sensation, like the distant whirr of an electric engine. It felt kind of like a shrug. Of course, Michael realised, KITT would still have an engine, right? _'The process seemed... fairly simple at the time. I remember doing everything. I simply don't recall how, or why.'_

'The process?' Michael shifted uneasily in spite of the ridiculously comfortable seat beneath him.

_'If you have a more appropriate description for it, then feel free to share. I'm working blind. Well...'_ KITT hesitated, seeming torn between amusement and fear. _'It might be fitting to say that I'm _seeing _you for the first time.' _

Michael, who had been opening his mouth to speak, suddenly hesitated.

There had been times, long ago, when Michael had been pretty certain that KITT was looking at him. Which sounded strange, because KITT didn't have eyes, per se – he had scanners and monitors and complicated text reading devices. He had never seen a human body. At least not in the way that humans saw. However, there were times, when they were alone in some dark allotment smack bang in the middle of nowhere, or talking quietly on the endless, empty roads, when KITT might as well have had eyes.

Bonnie shifted uncertainly in her chair, and exchanged a glance with Michael. 'KITT, I don't understand...'

_'No, Bonnie.'_ KITT said, calmly. _'Neither do I.' _

* * *

It was eleven fifteen in the evening, and the Laboratory was empty for the first time in days. Empty, that was, bar for three people. Four if you counted the AI, and everyone counted the AI. If they didn't then he would have made his presence felt very quickly anyway. KITT was never one to be left out, especially not during conversations involving himself.

Every now and then, Michael would cast a glimpse at KITT's new "body". Still absent of paint or molecular bonding, he looked almost the same as Michael remembered him, except for all the ways in which he looked utterly different. Michael knew this was a contradiction but he couldn't help thinking of it that way. There was design here: a merging of the sleek, streamlined Knight 5000, and the more rugged looking 2000. The corners were smoother, more rounded, and the whole thing seemed so light that it could lift off the ground at the drop of a hat. The tyres were about the only thing which resembled anything normal, and yet they still seemed worn down and un-roadworthy. As if there was no way they could gain any traction on a busy highway. It resembled no known car brand Michael could think of.

But it was KITT. Whatever had happened to him, and whatever it meant, that was enough for now.

They sat, talked, and tried to understand. There were papers spread out on tables, photographs and images of KITT from the past fifteen years. Reports from the deepest recesses of the Knight Industries Vaults, programming codes, system checks, recordings, videos, several large cups of coffee, and dominating it all was a large map, dotted with ink and thumb tacks. For a while everyone had just stood there, staring anxiously at the strange spectacle of the Knight Industries Five Thousands miraculous resurgence, and waiting for one of them to make the first move.

'Okay... well, the first thing we have here is the location of the accident,' Bonnie said at last, pointing to a spot on the map: '_Mistletoe Valley_. That's where everything began.'

Michael nodded. 'And here we have the place where Shawn and KITT were before they headed to Mistletoe. They were on a mission over 2000 miles away, near the Mexican border...'

_'That's a long way from Mistletoe Valley,'_ KITT said. He seemed as confused as they were. Try as they might, the files and bubble chips he'd had containing his memories pertaining to this very event had been damaged beyond repair, and there was no space for them in KITT's new brain and body. This was as new to him as it was to them.

Which was annoying, but still, Michael told himself, it wasn't KITT'S fault. They would just have to do their best with what little information they had. Shawn's resting in peace, not to mention his own sleeping patterns, depended upon their working all this out.

'It is, isn't it?' Jessica nodded. 'Which means that something happened to make you both stop whatever you were doing and head to Mistletoe right away, without informing anyone.'

_'I can't think why this would be.' _KITT said apologetically._ 'Surely we would never have made such an action without informing headquarters first?'_

'Well, you did,' Jessica said. 'There's no record of you having contacted us between your last check in upon arrival near Mexico, and when we found you in Mistletoe Valley.'

Michael paused, thinking. 'Damn it. what else do we have?'

'Baldtson Laboratory, and... maybe The Louisiana Cellracer, provided that's not just a red herring,' Bonnie added after a moment. 'Baldtson Labs is divided into three main sectors –cybertronics, biophysics and mechanics. Both the cybertronics and mechanical departments worked on Dennis Row's record breaking Louisiana Cellracer. He was trying to break the land speed record this year, but he got into an accident. His car came off the track and exploded, while he was travelling at over fifty miles per hur faster than KITT's previous known top speed.'

_'Again, that is possibly irrelevant,'_ KITT said. _'We're simply making a theoretical connection between the place I was... located, and the designers of the Louisiana Cellracer.' _

'Maybe,' Michael shrugged. 'But that's all we've got right now. And I'm not sure I believe in coincidences.' He sat down heavily on an industrial tool box. 'So. Branch out. Throw anything at us, KITT, anything at all that you might remember, no matter how useless or meaningless you think it might be?' There was a moment of silence, before Michael spoke again. 'Okay, I'll go first, just to show you that whatever you're thinking, it can't possibly be all that crazy...' He hesitated before adding. 'The airport.'

Bonnie blinked at him. 'You mean that light weight craft that crashed through the wall.'

'After tearing a gash through a quarter of the city,' Michael said. 'And the driver who knew my name. Don't ask me how that's relevant I don't know, just...'

'Call it a hunch?' Bonnie suggested, and Michael had to smile. 'KITT? What do you think that was all about?'

_'I honestly have no idea,' _KITT said and, after another long moment he added. _'...I do remember moving, though. At an exceptionally high speed.'_

There it was again. Michael's brain was beginning to piece things together, though he wasn't sure yet how the final jigsaw was supposed to look. The Cellracer trying to break the land speed record... the Baldtson funded aircraft that collided with the airport... KITT, and Shawn's death while travelling at high speed... The Laboratory...

Speed.

'Well there's our first connection,' he muttered.

'Albeit a very vague one,' Jessica didn't seem at all convinced. 'I'm sorry, guys, but doens't this all feel a bit... _Mystery Fiction Monthly_ to you? How do you know all of these amazing coincidences aren't simply that –coincidences?'

_'Speak for yourself, Miss Matthews,'_ KITT said. _'I happen to _enjoy Mystery Fiction Monthly_... Though I admit the digital version doesn't seem to come with the same free-offer benefits as the paperback.' _

Bonnie smiled vaguely at the confusion on Jessica's face. The poor woman was clearly out of her depth. She remembered teaching Jessica at University, what felt like a lifetime ago, how the woman's face had slowly transformed from bewilderment, to anger, to dismissal to slow, careful acceptance, whenever she was faced with a problem that couldn't be solved by plain logic and science.

The thing about Jessica Matthews was that you had to be patient with her. Which kind of reminded Bonnie of another person she knew rather well. 'Trust me, Jessica, when you spend as long as we have dealing with this kind of mystery-fiction-style hocus-pocus, you start to see connections everywhere,' Bonnie sighed. 'I know he _acts_ like a sloppy, footloose vagabond, free from authority, order, and the need to wear sensible shoes, but Michael knows what he's talking about. Usually.'

'Hey! I resemble that remark.'

_'What of Mister Maddox's disappearance?'_ KITT asked. Michael bit his tongue.

'Yeah, that's something else we need to work on.' He muttered. 'There'll be a connection there too, I'll bet.'

'How can we be sure we're not just _forming _connections where none exist?' Jessica asked after a moment. Then she shrugged in response to the incredulous looks this earned her. 'Well sorry, but it all sounds rather farfetched to me! You're theorising about some kind of... of massive_ conspiracy_ here, and yet the only connection we've made so far is that everyone was going really fast at the moment they died? Isn't that how _most _fatalities involving moving vehicles come about?'

'True, but most of those vehicles aren't the Knight Industries Five Thousand,' Bonnie said.

_'Thank you, Bonnie,'_ KITT sounded pleased.

'_And _most lightweight aircrafts don't crash through three metre thick concrete walls, no matter how fast they're going,' Michael added. 'And who knows what that Mister Row guy was up to, with that private track and top secret testing field of his. And another thing: they're _all _connected to the Baldtson Laboratories in one way or another. Dennis Row's machine was built there; Mistletoe Valley is where we... found Shawn and KITT; that aircraft was a prototype design from _their _cybertronics department, and then there's those abrasions on the pilot's face when he died...'

'Which almost exactly matched Shawn's,' Bonnie finished quietly. She seemed to shiver. 'You're right, Jessica. It _does_ sound like we're trying to piece together the pages of a murder mystery.'

'I'll say it is a murder mystery,' Jessica noted, quietly. 'And while we're asking difficult questions: we still don't know how KITT did _that_.'

She nodded in KITT's direction, to where Bonnie had a hand placed against his chassis: faint gold-bronze colouring which was nothing like his previous red or the black before that. The style quite unlike any make of vehicle currently on the roads today.

_'As I said, I have no idea how it happened.'_

'No, you don't have any idea about much,' Jessica said, dryly, then perked up before KITT could answer her back. 'But we have a name for it now. _Instinctive Molecular Cohesion_. IMC. KITT was somehow able to rebuild his frame based on the existing knowledge of his design and form in his databanks: and not just that, he was able to IMPROVE upon it, and... Create this. He rebuilt his entire molecular structure.'

Michael barely noticed Jessica's transition from ;it' to 'he' and now didn't seem a good moment to comment on it, so instead he kept staring it's KITT's dashboard, as if looking for answers.

'But –sorry, no offence, KITT, but you can't possibly do that,' Bonnie said.

'And yet he did.' Jessica said, a little sharply. 'Unless you think our department was able to completely rebuild him in under three hours?'

'We're FLAG, Jess.' Bonnie said. 'We've done the impossible when it comes to rebuilding KITT many times before and that sounds a lot more logical that what you're suggesting actually happened.'

'Look as flattered as I am by how well you think I run this team...'

'I'm not talking about this team, I'm talking about the old one.' Bonnie muttered. She sounded... irritated, and Michael, who knew her quite well knew they could put this down to her anxiety and nostalgia. Jessica wasn't so well informed and took Bonnie's comment as a personal insult.

'Well the old team isn't here! This isn't the flag you left fifteen years ago, Miss Barstow, with all due respect did you honestly think you could come back here and nothing would've changed?'

KITT coughed (in a sense, anyway). _'Ah... Bonnie? Miss Matthews, is this really the time for that particular argument?' _

Easy, KITT you know better than to get in the way of Bonnie when he's trying to duke it out with someone. I'm guessing Jessica here's the same.' Michael muttered.

Jess and Bonnie seemed to falter at his words, looking embarrassed.

Bonnie sighed. 'I'm sorry, Jessica, this situation just has be a little freaked out, that's all... The thought that all of this could happen, without anyone's help... I mean look at him. You're saying that this just _happened_? That you didn't have anything to do with it? Then what _did_ repair him? Did he activate some kind of... of hyper advanced repair cycle? He's never done that before and I'm pretty sure he wasn't designed to; this could've been caused by anything! Anyone.'

'Well, I think KITT knew what he was doing when... this happened, okay?' Michael said. 'It's not like we just let some alien run rampant over him. He's better than he was before!'

'You've never heard of the saying "beware the Greeks bearing gifts?"' Bonnie frowned. 'We don't know what caused this to happen!

_'Excuse me, but as must as I don't want to interrupt this conversation about my welfare, I should point out that the AI in question is still right here,'_ KITT said, primly. _'And he's wondering why on earth everyone is talking over, through, and about him, but nobody is talking_ to_ him.' _

'Hey, I'm talking to you.' Michael put in.

_'Thank you, Michael, but my point remains. I wonder if perhaps we are reading too much into this.'_

'You can't blame us for being concerned, KITT,' Bonnie said.

_'I know, and I appreciate your concern, but I'm hardly a Trojan Horse. And this...' _KITT's wheels shifted slightly. His dashboard flickered, as if he were testing himself. _'I see no downsides to this...'_

There was a pause in which everyone looked at KITT with a united expression of "Huh?"

_'Well, consider this from my perspective, I'm a car! Until now I have relied entirely upon others for my survival... My very body was dependent upon others. Now that dependency has been at least partially eliminated. At the very least I can repair myself now, in the same manner as any human body does. I'm capable of restoring my own programming, presumably on the move.'_

'Comfy seating, too,' Michael wisecracked, ignoring Jessica's resulting glare. But in spite of his quipping, something inside of him shifted at KITT's words. It wasn't that he had never considered what it must be like for KITT, to be so incredibly powerful, so unique intelligent, and yet so stunted by a body which couldn't change. And now KITT had healed himself from a nearly fatal encounter.

'Well then maybe 'Molecular Cohesion isn't the right choice of word,' Michael said.

'Well, what would you call it?' Bonnie asked.

Michael looked KITT right in the vocal modulator. 'How about Evolution?'

'Oh, please,' Jessica sighed. 'Now you're being ridiculous. I've bought everything up to this, but now you're talking a different language.'

'Well, you're perfectly happy to believe in the existence of a self-activating self repair mechanism, right?' Michael said. 'Isn't that exactly what every living body does? Isn't that what you've done, KITT?'

_'I… suppose so.'_

'Yes,' Bonnie agreed quietly. 'Why should biology rather than technology determine whether KITT can evolve?'

'It's not that, it's the science of it all.' Jessica went on. 'That's not what evolution is. Evolution is... developing and adapting to an environment or requirement. It occurs in a species _in-between _each generation of individuals, not within one body in one lifetime. That's not evolution, that's just learning.'

'But KITT's something different to all of that,' Bonnie says. 'He's not a species, he's unique. And he's not biological. Who says he has to operate according to the same rules of development as humans do?'

There was another brief moment of quiet while they processed this information before KITT spoke. _'I think we're branching out into philosophy and metaphysics, Bonnie, and as interesting as it may be, I don't consider it relevant. If I understand this correctly, then we have a potentially dangerous situation on our hand. Several incidents, all connected by the Baldtson Laboratories and all involving high speed vehicles.'_

'And you,' Michael finished coldly. 'KITT whatever's going on here, and whatever Baldtson is up to, I'm willing to bet you're right in the middle of it. Somebody is interested in you.'

'And that interest cost Shawn her life,' KITT finished, with what sounded like a note of heat and frustration. 'We cannot allow this act to go unpunished.'

'You're right, buddy,' Michael nodded. 'And we won't.'

'Then how do you suggest we proceed?' Jessica asked, eventually, her voice calm and composed. Clearly she was handing control of this situation over to them.

'We start by going back to the source.' Michael said, firmly, feeling strangely in control, yet simultaneously heavy with a sense of responsibility he hadn't had thrust upon him for a while now. He placed a hand on KITT's bonnet. 'KITT and I are going back to Baldtson Laboratories, and we're going to find some answers.'


End file.
